Tone Deaf in Thailand

Falling in Love Again

2011-12-07T09:02:00.000-08:00

Long ago I began to understand how climate affects the personalities of people who submit to it. Alaska’s short summers and unending winters breed a sense of urgency and the need for patience; Seattle’s grey gloom with bursts of glorious sunshine results in a city of mild depressives with brief manic episodes; Thailand’s perpetual light and heat breeds a joyful languor. And Beijing? Beijing is like New York, with four vivid seasons, ranging from extreme beauty to extreme cold to extreme heat and then back to beauty again. And like New York, it’s a city of crackling energy, vibrant emotions, and borderline anarchy.

Bilingual signs in Mandarin and English were everywhere, telling people what they couldn’t do—and usually within eyeshot were a group of people happily doing whatever was prohibited. Cutting into line wasn’t just accepted behavior, it was encouraged, and pedestrians seemed to regard red lights as challenges, not commands. People smoked where they wished, ate and drank where they wished, and on the lane where I stayed, it was common to see a small child walking past with a large bottle of beer, being useful.

Perhaps because living spaces are often crowded, public spaces were scenes of intimacy. Girls gave their boyfriends fierce hell, couples made out with abandon, loud cursing seemed to be a favorite outdoor sport, and little children urinated in place, wherever they happened to be. Once on a boat trip from the zoo to the Summer Palace, a puddle appeared at the feet of a small boy, becoming a pool, then a river.

“This would never happen in London!” a young woman exclaimed, looking at her own feet with dismay. “This,” her blonde, blue-eyed companion said in the calm tones of an experienced expat, “isn’t London.”

Beijing seemed to be a city with self-assurance, which delighted me because Bangkok was one of the most self-conscious places I had ever lived in. I had grown up learning about China’s oppression but what I saw in the country’s capital was a deep-rooted form of libertarianism laced with a generous amount of humor and friendliness.

Perhaps people are kind to me because I’m an old foreign woman traveling alone, I thought after Nana had moved on. But then I met Odette, a young woman from Mexico who had come to live in Beijing with her husband, a British journalist. She was a serious student of Mandarin, had given birth to her beautiful little girl in one of the city’s hospitals, and delighted people by introducing the child as a Beijing girl. She lived next to the walls of my guesthouse, in a traditional courtyard home where each room was its own little house with a yard in the middle, enclosed by a high wall. Her kitchen was modern, there was a washing machine next to the Western-style toilet in her bathroom, she shopped in the street market outside her gate and asked William’s wife in Mandarin how to cook the things she had purchased. Odette was firmly part of the world she lived in, but then she worked at it. Beijing seemed to expect no less.

In Bangkok, years slip past and expats who have been there for decades say things like, “No I don’t speak Thai—just never got around to it.” In Beijing I commented on a middle-aged woman’s Mandarin as she spoke to a bookstore clerk, envying her facility. “Why, don’t you have a tutor?” she demanded in shocked tones. The Bookworm’s author events were often bilingual and the predominately Western audience often laughed at Mandarin sentences that were obviously jokes. As a traveler, I could get by with saying hello and thank you and pointing at my bilingual city map and smiling frequently. If I lived here, I’d need a lot more than that, I realized as I struggled to remember how to say “This food is delicious.”

Old men would frequently test my linguistic prowess by addressing me in languages other than Mandarin or English. One elderly gentleman and I had a chat in French; his was much better than mine. Another asked me if I spoke Spanish. Not wanting to place my hillbilly Puerto Rican vocabulary against his undoubtedly pure Castilian, I in a cowardly fashion said no.

William’s mother-in-law gave me stern scoldings on how to dress for winter without one word of English, pulling at the leg of my slacks to see how many layers I wore beneath them and showing me what lay beneath her own pant leg. The most I ever counted was seven and the best I ever managed was four.

I began to realize that the extraordinary kindness I found in my neighborhood was pervasive. Beijing is supposed to be the size of Connecticut and has a subway system that links its farflung corners; I used it often, especially when I searched futilely for the Botanical Gardens that nestled against the hills that bordered the city.

There was a particular bus I needed once I got to the subway’s end, and I was damned if I could figure out which one it was. I found a farm community that was a lot like the outskirts of Bangkok—ramshackle street stalls, no sidewalks, sleepy dogs—and a number of impressive parks, but not the one I wanted.

On my third morning, I was almost ready to say the hell with it. I had shown off my map to a large number of people in a neighborhood beside a freeway, with no luck at all. Trudging down an empty sidewalk, I passed a teenage boy who carried a school bag and felt a flare of optimism. Perhaps, I thought, he’s learning English; I pulled out my rumpled map.

He was very young, with the troubled skin of early adolescence. He looked a trifle alarmed by being accosted by an old foreigner, but he looked at my map for a long time and silently pointed straight ahead. I thanked him and walked off, more than ready to abandon my search.

Then I heard the sound of footsteps behind me and there was the boy. He led me to the nearest bus stop, pointed out the number of the bus I needed, waited with me until it arrived, and told the conductress where I wanted to go.

The gardens were beautiful but what has stayed with me is the kindness of a young man with acne and a big heart.

On one of my last nights in Beijing, Odette took me to one of the lakes, along a back street route I would never have found on my own. We walked down a narrow, quiet alley way; low, curving walls protected small windows of light that emerged from many little houses. For one absurd moment, I was sure we had traveled through time and were back in the middle ages. Then we were at the shore of the lake, where the darkness was filled with the low voices of old men, fishing.

It would have been a postcard moment, except Odette had Mandarin. As I watched her in conversation, laughing and bantering and briefly entering another world, I wanted nothing more than to live in this city and learn to speak its language.

The Gift of Bookstores

2011-12-06T10:39:00.001-08:00

It's the holiday madness time but I'm enjoying my shopping adventures--every week I go off to my neighborhood bookstore and choose a few more books for people I love. It's a big, bright, light-filled space filled with things I want to read and not filled with Christmas cultch--no fat men booming hohoho or plastic trees laden with gaudy baubles, emitting a vaguely toxic scent.

I buy a cup of good coffee from a cafe that isn't a chain inches away from bookshelves and talk to friends and wander through a building devoted to the printed word. I leave feeling relaxed and happy and knowing that soon I'll do it again. This is what gift-giving ought to be.

I'm old-fashioned, I admit. Many people have found more high-tech and speedy ways to dispatch their shopping efficiently. An hour or two on a computer and packages go out to their recipients, all gift-wrapped and pretty; I can't do that. It lacks the element of surprise, not for the people I'm buying gifts for, but for me.

Serendipity is a word that has almost disappeared--it's the art of finding something you want when looking for something else, and bookstores (and record stores and video stores) are centers of serendipity. I may enter with a list and leave with something I didn't know existed until a minute or two before. For me, if shopping doesn't contain the potential for discovery, it's no fun at all.

And not just during the season of gifts--I feel that way all the time. I realized last night that I need to know more about maintaining a healthy heart. Yes, I know all the information known to mankind is on the internet but I don't have the time or patience to wallow through it all, separating nonsense from useful knowledge. For me, this is time better spent in a good bookstore, looking at titles, reading a page or two, asking the person who takes care of the health section for their recommendations--and today that's exactly where I'll be. It's the difference between a living, breathing community and pixels coming together on a piece of plastic, between the world of the senses and a flat-line life that strains the eyes and the wrists.

My city is a literate one that embraces all forms of literacy, and that's a good thing. People reading on an e-reader are still reading. And I know there will always be books in a physical, tangible form for people like me--I only hope there will also always be stores where I can choose them, surrounded by a community of readers.

Beijing Fever

2011-12-05T08:37:00.000-08:00

Watching HBO, eating a cheeseburger and drinking a beer while the lights of a metropolis gleamed through the window of my nineteenth floor hotel room, this was a normal scene in any business hotel, but I was in Beijing, feeling as though I were an extra in Lost in Translation.

I was a victim of the latest form of Orientalism. For several years before I’d been a judge for a literary prize given to nonfiction books about Asia; I’d read countless memoirs of Chinese who’d suffered during the Cultural Revolution and academic tomes about the rural migrants who left home to work in factories where conditions were Dickensian at best. I’d expected Spartan conditions in a dark and gloomy city, a hard pallet in a cold room and a squat toilet in the bathroom with a city-wide blackout after dark. I had seen photos of soaring and imaginative buildings in Vanity Fair but somehow felt they were an isolated phenomenon, a Potemkin village segment of a grim and shabby city where everyone looked dour, wore subdued clothing and rode about earnestly on bicycles.

Instead here I was, in semi-palatial comfort, in a hotel room where the bathroom alone was almost the size of my Bangkok apartment, the kitchen held a refrigerator that was taller than I, a sparkling white cotton bathrobe waited for me in the closet, and the sofa was so elegant that I yearned to take it home with me. There was a bar downstairs that served seventy different beers and the room service menu was in English. It was out of sheer curiosity that I’d ordered my cheeseburger; it was great.

A list of hotel amenities included a few prohibitions that included "lecherous acts" and the plaintive request "We kindly ask you not to walk out of the room with bare feet."

The next morning, slipped under my door, was a business card with Chinese characters, a phone number, and a picture of a young, willowy, and scantily clad woman, poised on a bed with a come-hither gaze. Her feet were bare.

A year later I stood with Nana in a narrow street lined with small shops and cottage-like houses and food stalls, listening to two women shriek at each other. We weren’t the only spectators. People came out of their stores and restaurants and homes to watch; it was better than reality TV. Nana turned to me in complete delight. “I can understand them!”

“What are they saying?”

“The bigger woman just told the other one to go fuck her mother’s cunt.”

I looked nervously at the other members of the audience; certainly one of them would call the Beijing version of 911 before there was blood in the street. But there, listening intently to every shout of obscenity, were old ladies holding the hands of tiny, uniformed school children, matronly women with shopping bags, trendy boys with hair like foxpelts dyed in brilliant shades of green, purple, or orange standing in the open doors of small beauty shops. None of them seemed ready to put a stop to the afternoon’s entertainment, Nana and I walked on, and a couple of blocks later made way for a bicycle bell behind us. It was a good thing too, because as it passed by, we saw a familiar and still belligerent face of a very angry woman.

I never knew what to expect when I went out to explore Beijing; its capacity to surprise me was inexhaustible. One minute I was in a neighborhood where old men sat outside together, drinking beer at ten in the morning, and then I was having an espresso in the audience at the Beijing Bookworm, listening to a Bengali novelist from Manhattan explain about the special, globalized vocabulary used on 19^th century clipper ships. On my first visit to the city, March was sunny and balmy; at the same time next year I plowed my way through several heavy snowfalls. One night on my way to the subway I heard music and soon found a whole parking lot full of people, ballroom dancing. In a park of ancient imperial splendor, people came with bags of table scraps to feed a community of cats that had taken up residence in a wooded corner of the landscape.

Living in Bangkok had accustomed me to contrasts, but Beijing was beyond any easy pigeonholing of ancient traditions/modern luxury. It was a place that took everything that had happened within its walls for three thousand years and jammed it all together to make a hybrid city, huge and impossible to duplicate anywhere else.

After my first visit, I babbled to my employer about it for close to an hour over the phone. When I finally stopped to take a breath, he laughed. “You have China Fever. It usually only happens to guys.”

I still have no idea if he was right. Other people have assured me that Beijing is not China and I’ve read strong arguments that the city is actually part of Mongolia. For me, it exists alone, within its own context, and from the moment that it first surprised me, I loved Beijing.

Giving Thanks

2011-11-24T09:13:00.000-08:00

Yesterday a tall slender young woman who was probably from Somalia, dressed head-to-toe in form-fitting turquoise shot with silver and holding a brilliantly yellow umbrella, walked down the hill outside my window like a spot of summer in Seattle's winter darkness. This morning the elderly Chinese gentleman who puffs his way back and forth, up and down, that same street with the reassuring regularity of a cuckoo clock, showed up in his usual sweater, scarf and sweatpants. Soon after, three young girls wearing down jackets in green, magenta, bright blue sauntered past, a small moving garden of blossoms.

Yesterday I stopped to talk to the young African-American guy who stands on my corner every day holding a sign for the gold shop on the next block. "I'm leaving next week," he told me, "I got a job on a fishing boat out of Dutch Harbor." He has been one of my heroes since I moved back and I will miss him.

The day before I sat and had tea with a couple from North Vietnam, on the Chinese border. Their baby woke up and watched me talk to him, moving his mouth in imitation, grinning at me when I applauded his efforts to speak. I love my neighborhood; I'm grateful to have found a place in it once more.

Today I'll leave it for a different part of the city, where I'll be with my family on the last Thursday of November for the first time in three years. Such happiness, such gratitude, so many, many thanks.

Inventing Home

2011-11-17T09:36:00.000-08:00

Every foreigner who stays in Bangkok lives in their own version of the city, partly because of the far-flung nature of Thailand’s capital, partly because of its malleability.

In spite of its stunningly up-to-date downtown core, Bangkok is made up of thousands of urban villages, every last one of them its own little community. There were—and I hope there still are—roads not too far from downtown where oxen stopped traffic as they lumbered slowly to the grass on the other side. Canal boats still whisk people back in time to riverine enclaves where mailboxes jut out over paths of water. And it's difficult to find a Bangkok neighborhood where local roosters don't issue wake-up calls.

My own neighborhood was far from pastoral and the advent of the subway meant it was bordered by more and more high-rise buildings that seemed to sprout up after every heavy rainstorm. But at the end of the road, near the subway entrances, where the pickup trucks waited for their next load of passengers, there was a tree. And one day as I walked past, it sparkled and glittered and glistened in the sunlight, festooned with silver that wavered and flickered in the morning breeze. The pickup truck drivers had brought their old CDs and tied them to every branch of this tree that stood alone and was knocked down to make way for a new condo-housing building within the following month.

When I visited with friends, other foreigners who made this city their home, they told similar stories about their neighborhoods, but the stories were never identical Bangkok was a gigantic Rohrschach test for the strangers in its midst; even Rodney and I, who lived in the same small community, saw different editions of it when we left the common ground of our house.

Most of my friends seemed to feel that when I returned to Chokchai Ruammit, I stepped out of the subway station and then fell right off the rim of the world. In a way they were right. When I came home, I emerged from a world that moved at a dashing pace of appointments punctually kept and a whoosh of constant motion into stop time, where I climbed into the back of a pickup truck and waited for the driver to finish his conversation or his cigarette or his nap. My journey home continued when he felt it was time to go and not before; then, when I had fully left the urbanity of downtown, I was allowed to re-enter my home turf.

I often envied Nana, who lived in a neighborhood that was served by motorcycles, not pickup trucks. Motorcycle taxis were fast and immediate; the drivers left when the passenger wanted, not when they chose to, and riding on the back of a motorcycle had infinitely more panache than huddling in the back of a pickup truck. And I was deeply jealous of my friend Will, who lived close to the banks of the Chao Phraya river and had a choice of motorcycle taxis or express boats when he went out into the world. But in Bangkok, you are where you eat, and long ago I had chosen to eat on Chokchai Ruammit. I knew its story to the same limited degree that it knew mine and we had accepted each other’s limitations. Without the pickup trucks, I would never have seen the silvered glory of a doomed tree.

The friend whom I privately called the AlphaDude was nourished by neon in the neighborhood where he had lived for almost twenty years. “I have everything I need here,” he told me, “Supermarkets, department stores, good restaurants, street food, the best hospital in the country, bookstores, bars, a population that comes from all over the world, and nightlife like nowhere else.” He lived within walking distance of Nana Plaza, an entertainment complex that employed enough people to populate a small city, a multi-leveled rabbit warren of rooms that blazed into life after dark. It was a place he roamed through regularly, making friends, collecting stories, having fun, entering its community on a level that many of its visitors didn’t care to explore.

Lee came from Seattle twice a year to stay in the same neighborhood, in a hotel he had found more than a decade earlier and never deviated from. He had become part of the staff’s family; they taught him Thai, brought him food, showed him how to live in his Bangkok neighborhood. All of them had come from somewhere else in the Kingdom and had learned the city inch by inch, just as he was. For Lee, the neon glories of lower Sukhumvit Road had become the surroundings for a village homestay; his hotel was a spot where he was always welcomed, a place where he could settle in and relax.

On the streets of their neighborhoods, every foreigner has two identities, the one they construct for themselves and the one the local residents have pieced together, which is usually accompanied by a local nickname. Few people on Chokchai Ruammit asked me what my name was and I had spent too much time there to be addressed by Mahdahm, the common appellation for foreign females. When I walked past street vendors I could hear the words that announced my approach and they were telling ones. Although I was sure I had found a home, within that home my nickname translated into “Vacation.”

If ever I yearned for a less publicly monitored existence with immersion that was far from total, I could snap myself out of it by remembering the morning I met a woman at a Starbucks in an affluent expat area. I got there first and as I went to order my latte from the counterstaff, a room full of women stretched their necks to see if I were someone they knew. When my companion breezed in a few minutes later, it took her five minutes to reach my table. “I love coming here,” she told me, “There are always so many other expats here in the morning and we’ve all become friends. I’m sorry I’m late but when I walked past Le Bon Pain, there was a group from the American Women’s Club and I had to stop to say hi because I’m president this year.”

My mornings rarely encompassed another foreign face unless Rodney was at home. I smiled and picked at my scone without enthusiasm. Silently I counted the minutes until I could go back to my neighborhood street and buy crisp little pancakes, placed together in a sandwich the size of a silver dollar and filled with molten hot coconut cream that had been sprinkled with fresh chives. Although there were days I wasn’t sure that was what I wanted, I was positive that the alternative would never be a room full of expats at Starbucks.

Thai Crime, Thai Smile

2011-11-16T07:52:00.000-08:00

Newspapers are where I turn for clues to the world around me and in Bangkok I received most of my enlightenment from stories about political turmoil and true crime. These were two areas that frequently overlapped, but I was happiest when I found the stories where they did not. Sons of politicians getting in bar brawls, brandishing firearms, and demanding “Do you know who my father is?” Boring. Bank robbers who successfully loaded their bags with cash after closing hours, then decided to take a nap and were found asleep when the bank opened the next day? Delightful.

I had become a connoisseur of Bangkok’s true crime journalism and would stare wistfully at all of the newspapers I was unable to read with their Thai script and their garish front page photos of blood and body parts. The Bangkok Post and The Nation were far too sedate for that; their model was the London Times, not the New York Post. But buried in their genteel reportage were stories of crimes that baffled and enchanted me; I hated those days when I missed a paper because I knew it held cultural insights that now I would never know.

In the mid-90s travel guides offered shrill warnings about strangers on Thai trains or buses who would offer tourists a snack or a bottle of water and then strip them of everything they had on their persons when the drug-laced gift put them to sleep. I was sure these stories were apocryphal until the days of the airport occupation when tourists were turning to any form of transportation that would let them continue their trip. A group of stranded travelers happily climbed on a bus that would take them out of Chiang Mai one night, enjoyed their complimentary snack, fell fast asleep and awoke in the middle of nowhere on a stranded vehicle with no driver, no conductor, no luggage and no money. There was a dash and style to that caper that I admired; it was imaginative, it took planning, it was nonviolent, and like the criminal mishaps that I treasured most, it was funny.

Banditry on a smaller scale took place on a Thai train when an armed man divested the passengers of the things they carried and then dove out an open window. One of the victims had the presence of mind to slam the window shut as the thief made his escape, closing it with such force that it severed some of the robber’s toes. The miscreant fled but the police had no worries about apprehending him. They knew somewhere in one of the nearby villages, at the end of a blood trail, limped a man with fewer toes than the ones he had been born with.

Rural criminals were the most brazen; not for them the random bag snatching while whizzing past on a motorcycle or the frenzied apologies of a working pickpocket who has just bumped into an affluent tourist on a crowded city street. Robbers in the countryside are after bigger game, like the men who drove into a village, took down the community’s water tanks which they claimed needed repair, and carried their haul off to sell to a scrap metal dealer. With chutzpah like that, I felt sure these thieves had to be using the gains from this heist to jumpstart their political careers.

Crime in Bangkok was usually more grisly than amusing, which is why the prize of my collection is the Squat Toilet Caper. A man entered a toilet cubicle to relieve himself but being more prudent than most, he removed his trousers, carefully folded them and draped them over the door of the stall, placing them so the contents of his pockets wouldn’t fall to the floor. While he was in no position to argue, he watched in horror as an invisible passerby pulled down his pants and walked away with them. Clad in his beautifully ironed white shirt, a tie, shoes, socks and underwear, the victim, who no longer possessed a wallet or a cellphone, was forced to commit an act of public indecency in order to find a policeman and another pair of trousers.

I was a crime victim only once. Walking down a dark soi in the heart of downtown Bangkok after having dinner, I heard a motorcycle slow down behind me and then there was a hard tug on what I had clutched in one hand. I kept my purse, my assailant got away with a shopping bag. His take was a pair of very old shoes that I was going to have repaired, a paperback in English and a copy of the daily paper. Luckily for me, and perhaps for him, I had already finished reading the newspaper.

Other people I knew or read about weren't so lucky, and in no way am I trivializing the really bad things that happen to good people all over the world, even in Thailand.

Fed by Art

2011-11-11T08:06:00.000-08:00

Pale sunlight turned into real heat that blazed into my Bangkok windows well before noon every day. I began to remember how difficult it was to read a newspaper under the gale force of a floor fan and if I wasn’t up by seven, I awoke in a tiny pool of sweat.

Life took on the languid quality of a fever dream; I moved slowly and any urgency I felt was only because I had invented it. Days slid into each other and I stood up a dinner appointment because I was still stuck in the day before.

I had just returned from Vientianne where I felt as though I’d wandered in to a deluxe Crayola box, the one with 64 crayons. The small Mekong city was drenched in color; temple ceilings replicated sunsets with shades of pink, pale blue, turquoise and buttery yellow, houses were painted in soft sherbet shades of pistachio or cantaloupe or lavender, and the traditional paisin skirts that almost every woman wore, whether she worked in a market or an air conditioned office, gave the dusty streets a brilliant vibrancy.

I usually lived in the basic Crayola box of eight colors. It amazed me that Thailand with its soaring imaginative use of flavors and textures in its food was so rigid and limited in feeding the eyes of the people who lived there. Buildings were grey, temples were white, red, and gold with touches of blue, scarlet flame trees and bushes of magenta bougainvillea lined murky canals, and for centuries the colors people wore each day were codified. It was still common even now to see yellow shirts worn by every age and gender on Monday and pink on Tuesday, oceans and oceans of yellow or pink every week on the same day. Red was the color chosen by supporters of the former prime minister in exile; otherwise it was worn only by the oldest and most beautiful princess—but then she was the rebellious one who ran off to marry an American.

I was starving for color, but when I found the vibrant shades I loved, my Thai female friends would smile and murmur “So bright,” leaving me with the feeling that I was a walking neon billboard. Although there was no longer a scheduled color for every day of the week, colors had an etiquette all their own and the older a woman became, the less she called attention to herself with the hues of her wardrobe.

I loved Bangkok’s Indian section, where fabric stores were filled with joyous riots of color for saris and the tunic and trouser outfits of the salwar kameez. Pinks and parrot greens, bright orange and crimson and turquoise and blazing yellows, glorious and gaudy and unrestrained, the textiles found in that part of the city observed no rules and I wandered through it more often than I ever did any of Bangkok’s art galleries. There was an anarchy in those colors that fed my spirit, as much as they nourished my eyesight.

The neighborhoods that I went to when I left my own were old ones. I walked and stared at decrepit wooden buildings with graceful Palladian windows that had been built by Chinese immigrants, at the brilliant white British grandeur of the house that became the city’s English library, at the road sandwiched between the fiery glow of a temple and a park’s cool greenery where men stood in the backs of trucks and tossed off big paper-wrapped bunches of roses as though they were handling bundles of cordwood.

I began to appreciate Thai food for what it was, an unconstrained art form; there were at least four places in my neighborhood that served chicken rice, and each one had their own sauce with its own flavors. Another place gave the customary condiment of chile and fish sauce a salsa-like quality by filling the sauce with fine slivers of ginger along with the incendiary specks of red and green. Every corner had a noodle soup place and the broth in each spot had its own distinctive taste.

Everything that grew in Thailand ended up in someone’s mouth. Mrs. Nupa put the small midnight blue blossoms of the butterfly pea into omelets because they looked so pretty; other people turned them into a bottled juice that was a deep navy-blue and had a fresh almost medicinal taste that cut through thirst on a hot day better than an ice-cold beer. A woman on my street handed me a leaf she had plucked from a nearby bush; when I put it in my mouth, I was surprised by a strong taste of zingy citrus. Even in the city, women squatted by roadsides, picking greenery that they would use in a meal later.

On the outskirts of Bangkok, I saw men hurl fishing nets into neighborhood waterways and once when I was walking along the banks of a city canal, a man’s grinning face emerged from the dark water, holding a large, squirming fish in his bare hands. The same sort of fish hit the street in my neighborhood at dinnertime, grilled in a thick crust of rock salt and stuffed with herbs.

There was an abandon to cooking and eating that was absent in much of daily life in Bangkok, an artistic license that belonged to everyone no matter much or how little they made. A common sight that had become a photographic cliché was the neighborhood street stall with customers who pulled up to it in their Mercedes. Bangkok’s world of food was creative, irreverent and democratic; it was no wonder that it was a city of passionate eaters who took to the streets every day.

And it was no surprise that when the revolution poured into central Bangkok, it was fueled by chili-laden papaya salad and grilled pork dipped into liquid fire. After all, the people in the country had already conquered the capital with their food. Now the relatives of the women who served som tam and larb moo and gai yang every day to middle class Bangkokians arrived in force to shove something less palatable down the city’s throat—the truth that their votes were not to be disposed of.

The Scent of a Lime

2011-11-04T10:56:00.000-07:00

Two days ago I was given a fresh, brilliantly green kaffir lime by one of the owners of my favorite neighborhood spot, Thai Curry Simple. I rubbed it between the palms of my hands for a few seconds, raised it to my nostrils, smelled the bright, clear, sharp scent that this fruit is known for and for a second I was back in the market at Huay Kwang, buying a bag of these so their fragrance would fill my room.

It's losing its color and its smell but still when I hold it close to my nose, I'm back in Bangkok. Then I close my eyes and I see the river that Viphawadee Rangsit Road has turned into during the past two weeks. I think of people whom I care about who have had to leave their homes without knowing what will be waiting for them when they go back. I see boats where cars and buses used to be.

I take a deep sniff at the fading odor of my lime and I'm on Chokchai Ruammit. I open my eyes and begin to think of how I could go back there for a week or so, the way I would long to visit a friend in the hospital, with no illusions of making a difference, because I need to, not because I'm needed.

I've always known scent is the most powerful drug there is. A man and a woman come together because of the odor of pheromones. Without the sense of smell, all that we would be able to taste would be dust in our mouths. And a fragrance can wipe away time and space, placing a person firmly in a memory for a moment.

Lime stings my nostrils, leaves its perfume on my fingers , and calls me back to a city that will always, forever, be my other home. "Come, see my new rivers, tell my new stories, I'm waiting. You've never seen me this way before."

My apartment lies near a flight path, my daily routines are punctuated by the sound of jets, and at night I look out my window at moving stars. I raise my empty hands and I smell the city I have known. I think of floods and swamps and the offerings that people make each November, little boats made of flowers and incense and candles placed carefully in rivers and canals.

Loy Krathong comes in five more days; this year Bangkok will be covered with lighted prayers, moving through the water, swept along with pieces of houses, garbage, dead animals. Only a crazy person would choose to be there if she didn't have to be; only a crazy person would continue to sniff at a lime whose scent is beginning to hold faint traces of rot. And, crazy with longing, I watch the planes soar past my window and wonder if one of them may have a seat for me.

A Tale of Two Airports

2011-11-03T08:09:00.000-07:00

For years when I came to Bangkok, I had arrived at an airport where I could smell Thailand as soon as I got off the plane, that steamy, musty odor that I loved, that carried hints of garlic and chili from whatever meal the cleaning staff had just finished eating. Long, dark hallways led to a big open space with currency exchanges and limousine services, and just beyond that the city began.

I always loved that first couple of minutes when I went outside and was slapped by a giant envelope of warm, moist air and the noise and color of buses and taxis and motorcycles and the immediate knowledge that I had come home. At the front of the airport was my road, Viphawadee Rangsit, shooting arrow-straight to my neighborhood. Across that road were food stalls that looked as though they catered to the Seven Horsemen of the Apocalypse and cooked meals that were fragrant and succulent and satisfying, with a never-ending supply of cold beer. After dark, neighborhood dogs came to sleep near the airport’s entrances, lulled by the blasts of air conditioning that escaped into the night as travelers came and went.

For decades politicians had talked about moving the airport from Don Muang to a spot that was known as Cobra Swamp. Don Muang was too small, they said, it was an island stranded in an ocean of traffic jams, and most damning of all, it wasn’t beautiful. Taipei, Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur all had sleek architectural confections studded with shops and restaurants for air travelers; Don Muang had ashtrays in the arrival area and sleeping dogs as sentries.

A year or so before Suwannaphum, The Golden City, emerged in Cobra Swamp, my friend Rodney missed a freeway exit and for many minutes we sped down an elevated expressway that was curving and new and almost completely empty. “It goes to the new airport,” he told me and I began to mourn the loss of Don Muang from that moment on.

Suwannaphum could be anywhere in the world. A mammoth shopping mall housed in soaring glass and steel that leaks in heavy rainstorms, it boasts miles of duty-free shops that sell the usual liquor and kitsch and nicotine, a long series of moving walkways where a robot voice issues incomprehensible warnings in maddening repetition, and food that’s franchised in airports from Hoboken to Harare. The only thing that ever feels at all Thai in that place are the brightly colored plastic buckets that sprout up during monsoon season, strategically placed to catch the rainfall that drips through cracks in the very beautiful roof.

At Don Muang there had been a footbridge that led across the highway to a hotel with a comfortable, shabby lobby. At Suwannaphum in the bowels of the building there are airport trains that whisk travelers to the Skytrain stations in the heart of Bangkok. With a little luck and good management, it’s quite possible to fly into Thailand’s capital, go to a downtown hotel, spend a weekend there shopping and dining and luxuriating in spas, and then fly away without ever breathing the air of the city for more than a few minutes.

Suwannaphum had the ability to make me miss Bangkok before I even cleared customs.

On the way to my hotel, longing for a place to collapse before I began my apartment search, I stared numbly at miles and miles of concrete buildings planted in flat empty spaces. As the city skyline came into view, the cabdriver gathered his courage and his English vocabulary and spoke.

“Madam,” he glanced back at my bedraggled body clothed in what in another universe I’d chosen as an appropriate travel outfit, austere yet definitive black and crisp white. “Are you a Sister?”

I shook my head in silent exhaustion and misery, wondering what clothing in Bangkok I would find that would fit me while proclaiming to the world at large that I was neither a missionary nor a cloistered nun.

Knowing Home

2011-11-02T08:14:00.000-07:00

One of my first memories of home is watching it burn to the ground. Everything after that seemed temporary. Even the big, two and a half storey house that my father built, a place that caught the wind and rocked like a ship when there were storms, its precisely placed windows framing a range of dormant volcanoes and a thin grey ribbon of saltwater—that was always more of a retreat than a home. I can’t remember ever living in it for more than a year at a time.

Alaska was still the Last Frontier and the life of my family reflected that. We moved to wherever my father found work and set up camp in temporary housing. The place on the hill often stood empty, waiting for us, while we made ourselves at home in places we knew we would leave.

My parents had carried the seeds of their immigrant forbears with them when they came to Alaska. Their dream was to make a home in one spot that would house generations; they had claimed enough land for a whole village of their tribe. But while they talked about home, I talked about leaving it.

Everyone carries lessons from their childhood; what I carry with me like a scar is that I can quickly feel at home almost anywhere but home is a word I’ve never learned to understand.

For most of my life, my home has been the body that carries me through the world, blood and bones, muscles and neurons. The romantic fantasies of my adolescence that I pinned to the walls of my room were a narrow, curving Parisian street, the spired domes of Montmartre, and Che Guevara. I stared at these images and wondered where in the world my home might be.

Then in mid-life, I knew I had found it. Bangkok was my place. It puzzled me, infuriated me, delighted me, and engaged me as no other place had before. Its damp heat settled around me like a blanket; its multi-toned language with its sinuous and enigmatic alphabet awoke a primal curiosity I’d left behind in childhood. Here was a place I could live in forever, asking what and why.

So when I was sixty, I packed two suitcases and came home, to a place I knew I’d remain for the rest of my life.

By the time I moved to Bangkok, I believed I knew it rather well. I’d been rigorously schooled in Thai behavior codes, I had a rudimentary, badly pronounced vocabulary, I had a neighborhood I had spent years in during my earlier forays into the city, I’d written a slender little book as a thank you note to the city. I knew I had much more to learn; what I didn’t know was how much I would have to relearn.

I had left Bangkok in 2001; I came back to stay in 2008. The world as we knew it in the past century had tilted viciously in the new millennium; what we were all about to learn was our planet was in the process of turning upside down. Nobody, anywhere, in spite or because of Homeland Security, would know the safety and protection of being home ever again. All over the globe, people were redefining what home is, as opposed to what they had been taught that it was.

Before I unpacked my suitcases, still locked in jetlag, I turned on the television in my hotel room and heard the measured tones of a BBC announcer proclaim that the United States had economically collapsed. At four in the morning, I listened to a panel of Englishmen calmly discuss which nation would be the next leader of the world and I began to hyperventilate. I’d lived in Thailand when the baht fell and the economic repercussions had businessmen leaping from high-rise windows in Tokyo. Switching off the television, I stared into the darkness, feeling molecules whirl about me with no fixed place to rest.

A Sense of Place

2011-10-31T07:23:00.000-07:00

For the past three years, if I were to wake up in darkness, I had to rouse myself by five in the morning. Even then, gleams of a paler shade of black shone at the edge of my eastern view and then lavish streaks of gold and pink--and then the sun, already in full blaze by six. If I slept much past eight, I awoke in a little pool of sweat.

Where I live now, the dark sky doesn't brighten until after seven, turns an opalescent grey and then a bright eggshell with a barely visible, tentative back-layer of faded pale blue. The spruce trees that edge the freeway are black cut-outs beyond the squares of dark brick and the headlights that never stop moving. Slowly the seagulls move in to see what the garbage trucks might have dropped the night before.

Even though daylight savings means that dawn and twilight will both come an hour earlier in a few days, this ridiculous manipulation of time matters very little in the Northwest. Soon we'll all get up in darkness and face nightfall before five in the afternoon and then after Christmas watch our daylight increase by a few minutes every day. Until that light begins to count, happy hour is a city-wide ritual in Seattle.

For people who live in one geographic area all of their lives, the end of the day holds no sense of wonder. In Bangkok, nighttime is when the air cools, the food carts hit the streets, meals take on a leisurely pace at the end of a workday; every sunset begins a new little festival. In Alaska, being out at night for much of the year could well mean death; home was an essential retreat where heat and light were weapons against what lay in wait outside. In Seattle, the difference between the gloom of day and night is often miniscule; winter is flatline time when heavy drinkers perfect their skills and the rest of the city stays home. For each of these parts of the world, this is the way it's always been; this is the way to live.

In Bangkok, I sometimes wish for a storm to sweep in and turn the air into the fresh crispness of an autumn apple. In Seattle, I want the night sky torn into rapid flashes of light, dancing like snakes and x-ray beams and blankets of fire. In Alaska, the darkness sends me as quickly as possible to the nearest airport.

Eight am in Seattle and the light is ashen; on the other side of the planet, Bangkok at ten pm is still eating. My day begins at a time when only three months ago it was winding down. Schizoid with the weird gift of having lived in more than one place, I yearn for both, now, for the ability to toggle between one and the other like windows on a computer screen.

Dazed and Confused to the Max

2011-10-21T09:08:00.000-07:00

I usually write to try to make sense of things. When I'm feeling confused I begin to put down what puzzles me into words and flounder my way through what I think and feel to find a small point of clarity. As that last sentence clearly illustrates, clarity eludes me now.

In the three years I was away from the U.S. my country lost stature in the eyes of the rest of the world in almost every way you care to name. And nobody--not our President, not our elected representatives, not the majority of our citizens--seems to acknowledge this, or even care. The country that owns most our debt, the People's Republic of China, is excoriated for not reducing the value of the yuan by a country whose own currency would be valueless were the Chinese not holding our paper.

I'm in a US city that has been less hard hit by what nobody will call a depression than most of its counterparts. In true Pacific Northwest fashion, income isn't a topic of discussion and results from the 2010 census aren't yet available online.However, some things are obvious to a newly returned former expat.

There are a lot of very poor people on Seattle's streets. There are a lot of people who are just getting by, at least in my Chinatown neighborhood. Although I myself make about as much as I did when I left to live in Thailand at the end of 2008, it's no longer enough in 2011 Seattle. And I'm not at what my country considers poverty level ($11, 344 per year for a single person). However, by the time I pay my rent, phone, internet and electrical bills, there's very little left over to cover more than food. My big monthly splurge has become a copy of Vanity Fair and I use the library almost daily, with deep gratitude.

Every week I pick up Seattle's two free weekly papers and look at what's available for fun in this metropolis. Movie theaters abound here, but at 10-11 dollars a ticket. I haven't gone to one yet. Music at a club? 10-18 dollars to get in. A reading at Town Hall costs 13 dollars, the cheapest theater tickets are 12 dollars. It didn't take long for me to understand that to have a social life, I would need a credit card--and we're not even beginning to discuss buying clothes, shoes, an occasional 9 dollar sandwich at a downmarket delicatessen, or a cocktail from one of the newly-fashionable artisan bartenders.

I would make a bet that many of the people who do have a social life in Seattle are heavily in debt--and that's nothing new. I certainly was in the '90s when I tried to juggle rent and food and going out on a bookseller's salary. But we're in an economic downturn now, right? Shouldn't prices reflect that somehow? I foolishly thought so, before I returned to the US.

What is wrong with the picture I see here? People are walking away from houses they can no longer afford, 8.7% of the population in the Seattle-Tacoma area is unemployed, 12% of the population of Washington state is said to be using food stamps: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/pacificnw/2011906512_pacificpfoodhunt30.html?cmpid=2628 and a friend who is lucky enough to qualify for low-income dental work has to put his share of the bill on a credit card to afford emergency tooth repair.

It's been estimated that to buy a 1980 US dollar would take $2.75 cents in today's currency. To those who fume about China's currency, I'd say they have a severe problem of their own at home. Why isn't it being addressed in a meaningful way? Why hasn't the IMF stepped in? They certainly are quick with solutions for other countries, many of which are painful and stringent.

I'd say off hand that we can't afford the wars we're fighting, that our defense budget is killing us, and that equal taxation for all income levels needs to happen now. But I'm no expert--just a returned US citizen who becomes more and more confused every day.

Preoccupied

2011-09-28T10:29:00.000-07:00

"I went down to the demonstration, to get my fair share of abuse"--You Can't Always Get What You Want

I stood on a street corner with twenty other people on Monday afternoon, holding my cardboard sign so that drivers and bus riders could see--what? That I was dissatisfied? That the country is being dominated by corporate interests? That attention needed to be paid to the Wall Street occupation? Nobody seemed to know exactly why we were there; the most consensus I heard was that "Fuck the Banks" was the sign that everyone but me liked best.

"We need more laborers," one woman remarked as a passing garbage truck driver honked his horn in approval. "Laborers are working," I replied and she said, "I left work early." I swallowed any response that I might have to that, while thinking that was easily one of the more elitist comments I've heard at a rally.

An Australian I know recently remarked that protest in America is a ham-strung activity, allowed only so the US can say, "See--we allow dissent." After my foray into protest politics, I know he's correct. Policemen stood on the steps of the Federal Building; "You can't stand here," one of them politely informed me, "This is federal property." We also can't march without a permit or do anything more than stand on a sidewalk, holding our signs and preserving the peace.

"We need signs that are confrontational," one Occupier said in a gmail, "so we can get media attention." Apparently the revolution may not be televised but the protest has to be.

Confrontational signs aren't going to make a difference in public support, however, and there are people who may question the sentiment of "Fuck the banks." What about "Make them pay"? Now there's a sentiment that most struggling citizens would support, regardless of political orientation, but that doesn't seem to be the point. I'm not sure of what the point is--except while people are being ignored on the streets, the Senate has staved off a government shut-down with a temporary stop-gap measure.

The Occupations are keeping people preoccupied--more bread, more circuses, reactive, not active, much sound, little fury--and even less focus. Unfortunately more Americans are concerned with Facebook changes than with amorphous, polite and ineffective token protests. Maybe social networking is the new protest ground--it certainly draws more attention than do signs on a street corner.

Sitting on a Computer Monitor

2011-09-18T08:19:00.000-07:00

In an entryway to the terracotta building across from me someone last week put an ancient computer monitor with a sign taped to it saying "Free." It's still there and on this drizzly morning a man has used it as a chair for the past two hours. The monitor is sheltered and dry, and as he sits on it, so is he. He smokes and stares, gets up to drop his cigarette butt in the street, goes back to his seat and lights another one.

I watch him from the luxury of an apartment, realizing the very tentative and fragile separation between us. It's a cliche that most Americans are one paycheck away from being homeless and the gap between this man and me is much smaller than the distance provided by the street that lies between us.

For the past month I've done my best to make one hundred dollars last for thirty days. My rent and telephone bill are paid, I have--thanks to a good friend--a bucket of dried catfood in my closet. I have rice in my kitchen, both jasmine and glutinous. I have fish sauce and tea and the water that comes from my kitchen faucet is potable. A store across the street sells pork and chicken in two-dollar packages. I have so much more than so many people in the world-- or in this city.

I think of how long one hundred dollars--three thousand baht--would keep me going in Bangkok. My conclusion surprises me--not as long as it does here. In my other home, my rent and internet and utilities were well under half of what I pay for an equivalent space in Seattle. But I paid thirty dollars a month for bottled drinking water, fifteen dollars a month for the pickup trucks that took me to the end of my street where most of the shops were, sixty dollars a month for food--at this point I'm already at one hundred and five. That doesn't include catfood, catlitter, coffee beans, Skytrain and Underground transportation, coins for the washing machine in my building, a meal in a place with airconditioning, a riverboat ride, or a bottle of beer at night at home. Barebones living for this farang in Bangkok cost at least two hundred dollars a month; it wasn't fun but it was functional. And the Thai people who surrounded me would have been appalled to know that a farang lived that way.

I have to confess that I usually didn't. There were things that nourished me in Bangkok--meals with friends outside of my neighborhood every two weeks or so, Vanity Fair and The Atlantic magazines, the Bangkok Post every day, the International Herald Tribune once in a while, a carefully chosen book from Dasa Book Cafe or Kinokuniya, shoes which never seemed to last more than a month, haircuts when necessary, and the essential trips out of the country to keep my visa going. My Bangkok life was far less luxurious than that of many of my friends--farang or Thai--but it took every baht I made to maintain it.

I came back to the U.S. with no idea of how much my daily life would cost me--I was deeply relieved to find an affordable apartment and get my internet access within it. But deposits and installation charges dug deeply into my financial resources and now I find that my dabblings into barebones living in Bangkok are helping me to move on in the U.S.

Next month will bring another paycheck--or so I hope with every fiber of my heart and soul. Meanwhile I feel true gratitude every time I get drinking water from my faucet and books to read from my public library and a movie to watch at the end of a day from hula.com. And I offer a quiet little thanks that I really enjoy rice and fish sauce.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

2011-09-04T07:27:00.000-07:00

A month ago, I left a mammoth stack of belongings for the Burmese family that kept our apartment building clean, viewed my neighborhood through a taxi window, and got on a plane to Seattle, feeling numb. I thought I'd be jubilant, excited, sad, all at the same time.

I felt nothing at all.

There was too much to feel on that day. I was leaving a city that had dominated my heart and mind since 1995. I was returning to a country that held my family and most of my personal history. I had been gone for three years and had given away almost every possession I had when I left for Bangkok. The thought of rebuilding a life in Seattle--finding an apartment and furnishing it with the most basic essentials, towels, plates, cookware--was no longer one that excited me. I had done it too often. I refused to think about it and when it did flit across my mind, I felt very, very tired.

The magic of flight has turned into a weird state of suspended animation for me; I was frozen in place and began to thaw only when I lurched toward the spot where my oldest son waited for me. I had forgotten how many different skin tones and faces and languages lived together in Seattle and the sight of them was exhilarating. And that exhilaration has persisted throughout the thirty days I've been back.

The diversity of this city feeds me; without it I would starve. Near the suburban apartment where my son's girlfriend lives is a compound that holds a Tibetan temple and the community that serves it. The musicality of Spanish and Mandarin fills the city buses. In a building on the block adjacent to my own is a storefront with windows covered in butcher paper, embellished only with a small string of Chinese characters on a strip of red paper. It used to be one of the few convenience stores in my neighborhood that sold beer and cigarettes; I thought it was just another empty space until I walked by one warm afternoon. The door was open and inside were tables of old men, playing mahjong and the sound of their tiles took me back to Chengdu in a second.

On the next block is a capoeira school that is open only in the evenings--wide open. A sign invites the neighborhood to stop, watch, and join in if they choose. A bit further is a lovely little branch of the Seattle library where most of the dvds and magazines are not in English. I love going there; it's the living room for my neighborhood, although tax cuts have forced its closure for the past week, along with every other library in the city.

Yesterday I woke up with a copy of the New York Times that I'd bought the day before--from Read All About It in the Public Market, a newsstand in the classical mode (a common sight in Beijing but rapidly disappearing in the US--Seattle has only one). The section for the visual arts was crammed full of things that dazzled me--a restored carousel housed in a "$9 million transparent jewel box" (rides free for children under 3, $2.00 for everybody else), African art in the Brooklyn Museum that includes a portrait mask of Elvis from 1977's Malawi, a gallery at MOMA devoted entirely to Hannah Wilkes' 'feminist video and installation work"--and that's only the first page.There are four more, one dominated by the story of Kyohei Inukai, a Japanese expat painter who was Manhattan society's darling until Pearl Harbor; at 55 his life as a paid artist stopped. He lived for twelve more years.

Yes, that's New York for you, but Seattle has more art than I can reasonably expect to see in a month; while I was in Bangkok, my friend Alan Lau sent me regular monthly listings of what the Asian art community was up to and that act of charity helped to lure me home. It's true that my travel has been truncated by my return to the US, but my visual world has expanded beyond all measure. While much in the States is admittedly mediocre--its national cuisine (responsible for corndogs and macandcheese and Big Gulps ), its movies, and its politics run from bad to abominable--but its artists, be they visual, dramatic, literary, musical, or in motion, are vibrant and exciting and prolific. For me, that's "America" and within that realm, the promise and possibility and diversity goes undimmed, still lifting "its lamp beside the golden door."

Summer into Autumn

2011-08-27T07:37:00.000-07:00

If I could have been granted every wish for my resettling into Seattle, it would have been no different from what I have been welcomed with in the past three weeks. An apartment waited for me not only in my old neighborhood, but in my old building, bigger and brighter than the one I'd lived in before. Sunlight pours through my eastern window in the morning, the western as the days end, and my view is of brick, terracotta and a furl of green trees on a nearby hill.

Summer in Seattle is an intoxicating season which came late this year. I like to think that it was waiting for me. Having warm sunlight strike my skin as I drink my morning coffee is a blessing--and one that had often eluded me in my final months in Bangkok. Here through the buildings that slope toward Puget Sound it's almost always possible to glimpse the water, which glitters and sparkles with sunlight and always stops me cold when I see it. Loveliness.

Although the pain of giving away my horrendous little Bangkok cat was enough to make me feel I wouldn't have another for years, life thought otherwise and an orange kitten and I found each other. I've wanted an orange guy for decades and was always claimed by a different shade of feline, but Mean Mr. Mustard Mulrooney walked in and took over me, my apartment and everything in it without a bit of hesitation. Happiness.

Yesterday I wandered through Seattle looking for presents. My youngest son's birthday is coming soon and for the first time in a long time I'll be able to spend part of that day with him. There is no word to sum up what I feel when I think about that.

Life is very, very good.

Finding Home

2011-08-24T10:06:00.000-07:00

In the past three years, as I bounced from Bangkok to Beijing, Hong Kong to Penang, and points in between for briefer moments, I'va always asked myself, "Could I live here?" And except for Penang, with the jangle of noise I heard for hours every night, the answer was yes I can. My way of traveling is to find a neighborhood and settle in for a month, then return and repeat again and again (which I should have done in Penang). I wander and develop small aspects of daily living and learn the city as much as I can. And yes, I did find a way to live in Chungking Mansions and in a hutong tangle off Xinjiekou Street and of course on Chokchai Ruammit. I love all three of those neighborhoods and if I could clone myself, I'd be in all three right this very minute.

But...long ago I made two decisions that changed my life forever. I had children, at a rather young age. I always told myself that when they became adults, I would become a late-life adolescent, roaming the world, having adventures, finding stories--and I did.

What I didn't realize was how much I would enjoy and be nourished by the company of my adult sons, and how shriveled I would feel after I turned sixty without their nearby presence in my life. I'm lucky. They both live in one place, which is where I live now too.

We don't see each other every day or even every week, but for me saying goodbye to them at an end of a visit without fighting off tears is a great and marvelous joy. It has brought me a feeling of tranquility that is almost alien to me; one afternoon as late afternoon light turned the floor of my room to soft gold, I looked up from the book I was reading and felt that the squirrel cage that had been in perpetual motion for almost three years was quiet.

I haven't divorced myself from Asia. I live in Seattle's Chinatown/Nihonmachi/Little Saigon neighborhood where everyone I see every day has made a home far from home. The lady in the dollar store is from Vietnam as is the family who roast whole pigs in huge ovens and serve up pork in various dishes all day long and the lady who makes egg tarts and cakes and banh mi in her bakery/cafe. A Thai man has a little video store on my block and Chinese herb stores are everywhere. Little groceries and two large supermarkets are devoted to food stuff from all over Asia; my first purchase was a ten-pound bag of hom mali from Thailand and the fragrance of steamed rice fills my studio apartment every day.

I'm planning my next visit back and it will be for at least two months when I do. There is so much still to see and to explore, and friends to be with, and stories to find. But I am luxuriating in a sense of happiness and calm that has eluded me during my time in Asia. Is it age that makes this so sweet to me? Or is it the knowledge that I can have the jolt of seeing and learning something new right outside my apartment building?

I know that darkness will be the prevailing quality of my days here all too soon. The clouds will settle over Seattle and they won't go away before next July. But I have people I love to brighten the gloom and books to write and food to cook. I have holidays to celebrate that over the past three years I have done my best to forget.

It's taken a long time to understand that home is where you are able to feel peaceful, and where you are near the ones you love best in the world--and yet that this doesn't preclude wandering and discovering in places on the other side of the globe. I feel blessed to know that in every cell of my body, in every portion of my brain, and best of all, with my whole heart.

My Last Day in Bangkok

2011-08-23T12:47:00.001-07:00

Final Days

2011-08-03T17:39:00.000-07:00

I didn't do anything that I had intended to do. In my last mornings I drank too much coffee and stared at the sky, which is the way I began my time here in this incarnation. I took the comfort way out in the afternoon, although the two-hour traditional Thai massage that I was subjected to wasn't exactly comforting. My haircut with two long, luxurious shampoos was and so was the best mani/pedi I've ever had--also two hours with much saran wrap and lotion and concentration on each of my twenty nails.

It's appropriate to end this stay like this. I've been in an expat frame of mind here for the most part, whereas in other times I could fool myself into thinking that I was living a Thai life. Like many snobs, I have felt that to have an authentic experience here, I had to be uncomfortable.

In some ways, I defend that position to the death. The worst Thai food I've had here has been eaten under airconditioning, although I've also found some truly abysmal food stalls. And buses, whether taken in the city or to a national border, are self-enclosed communities; the Skytrain and subway are not. Outdoor markets are the place to buy fruit and fish and flowers--not supermarkets.

But although my recent experience here may not have been as I wished it to be, it has indeed been Thai. This multi-layered society has room for many ways of living, and mine hasn't even come close to Bangkok luxury. Or even middle-class living. As always, I've gone for the bizarre, Bohemian, bookish life that I lead anyplace that I sleep in for more than three nights.

There is so much I haven't seen in Thailand--and quite a bit that I haven't seen in Bangkok. The other night a friend took me to a chic little bar called WTF, where you can have a cocktail that wouldn't disgrace any stateside bistro and Elliott Smith was played in the background. I had a Beer Lao Dark and tried not to feel too out of place. I've never been to Soul Food Mahanakan, the spot du jour run by an American chef that's rumored to have the best gaeng hang ley in the city, or Nahm, David Thompson's controversial foray into Bangkok's hip scene.

And I don't care. What bothers me is that I haven't yet had the salt-encrusted grilled fish on my soi and I've only been to Elvis Suki and the ice-cream place in a shophouse livingroom three times and I definitely have not eaten enough shwarma. And if you gather from that sentence that Bangkok is food for me, you would be absolutely correct.

When I come back, I'll go to Thailand with just enough time in Bangkok to see friends. There's still so much to see and to do and to taste--and like any good gourmand, I've left room for more.

The Newspaper Woman

2011-08-01T18:46:00.000-07:00

I went to the end of my soi where the old lady used to sell me the Bangkok Post http://tonedeafinthailand.blogspot.com/2011/06/all-news-all-time.html with the feeling that I had lost a finger--nothing felt quite right. But within a day or so, there she was, sitting at a little card table in front of the new internet shop that had taken the place of her magazine storage area, with a few newspapers in Thai spread before her. And then at the beginning of July, she called to me and beckoned toward the table. "I have it," she told me.

And there was the Bangkok Post--one copy at the end of the table. She beamed at me and nothing was quite as lovely as that toothless smile.

I've gone every day since to buy my paper; recently she's been asleep, only waking when I put a weight on top of my payment to keep the baht notes from flying away. I know her days are numbered--and I've told her mine are as well. Her take on that is that my sons ought to move here instead.

Her table has expanded to a magazine rack--she is back in business. Someday she'll nod off for her nap while at work and die happy--we should all be so lucky.

Beijing Story

2011-07-28T00:39:00.000-07:00

Beijing wasn't at its best in April a year ago. The trees that give the city much of its beauty were still bare and bony-looking and the sky was a leaden bowl. It took a fair amount of effort to bundle up against the chill of early spring and wander and look, but there was a path along a canal to follow and I set off.

Suddenly on my left was a huge area, fenced in, with standing stones in formation and a pagoda on a hill. Bamboo provided a note of greenery that my eyes were starving for so I approached the open gateway. A man in a small guardhouse waved me inside--no ticket, no fee.

The stones were eerie, looking as though they'd grown from the ground they stood upon. A wall of rock buttressed the hill on which the pagoda was perched. There were pavilions scattered over the landscape and a lovely curving path led me into the bamboo grove. The only signs were ones that warned against electric shock with cartoon-like images; nowhere was there an admonishment for visitors to behave in a good manner or pictures of items forbidden in this mysterious spot. There were no park benches or anything that indicated this was a public area, except for children playing on the pagoda's hill and a couple of old men sitting in the pavilions.

The path that twisted into the stand of bamboo led to a walled-off construction site and there were clothes drying on a line that had been strung between two standing stones. Men in hardhats looked up and smiled as I turned to retrace my steps.

Broken things--what looked like an incense burner, bits of statues, and large white cylinders that seemed as though they might have been parts of columns were strewn about near the pavilions. The fenced area was spacious in a city where space indicates wealth and yet I had no idea of what it was or had been, only that it was enigmatic and beautiful.

I took a picture of a sign carved in stone, the only one I could find, and asked a woman what it said. It warned that nearby were municipal electric power lines, she told me. Still puzzled, I kept the photos I'd taken and continued to wonder about where I had been.

Months later in Bangkok, I bought a book called Peking Story, written by a man named David Kidd, who had, in the year I was born, met the aristocratic Beijing woman he would later marry. Her family had lived for generations in an old mansion with more than a hundred rooms that was surrounded by a wall; it “sprawled over several acres,” with a garden that was "more than fifty thousand square feet."

Kidd was in Beijing when Mao reinstated the city as China’s capital and when the Communist government became officially installed with elaborate and jubilant ceremonies. He eloquently describes his father-in-law’s funeral and he is Felliniesque when he tells the story of the last party in the garden at which the guests arrived in costume under the full moon. "That's not a costume," he tells a smitten diplomat, "she really is a Mongolian princess," although, he continues, "I hadn't the heart to tell him that the Mongolian princess was really a Mongolian prince."

But for me, it was the house and grounds that I tore through the book to learn more about; its bamboo groves, its “tree-shaded paths,” the rock grottoes, the hill that symbolized Mount T’ai. It sounded familiar and then suddenly I came to a full-stop because I had chills.

For the decadent costume party, the family’s electrician was called in to tap power from “the city electric lines that ran just outside the garden wall.” I thought of the sign that had been translated for me and read even faster to see if I could find where this house had been.

I found no address but the more I read, the more I was certain that I had been on the grounds of the mansion Kidd had lived in. I was positive the paths I had walked were part of the ‘private landscape of careful deception” that he described and that the stones I had seen were the same that he wrote about. “Lavalike…filled with holes and hollowed into whirls and arabesques by wind and water”; or “balanced on slender ends, like sculptured maidens on tiptoe”, or “long, striated, grey shafts of stone that shot straight up out of the earth”, “the rarest” with ‘more stone below ground than above.” “They are called, living stones,” Kidd’s brother-in-law told him, “because it is believed that they grow an inch every hundred years.”

“Unlike a Japanese garden, which is made chiefly to be looked at, a Chinese one is meant to be walked in.” That, I realized, was what had drawn me in to the place I had stumbled across and had walked through, feeling somehow spellbound.

When the house was sold, Kidd said, it took two weeks for two hundred horse-drawn carts to empty it of its contents. And then, he writes, it was razed to make room for offices of the Ministry of Finance. When he saw where it had once been thirty years later, “where the courtyards and gardens should have been” there was “a forbidding, multi-storeyed brick building.”

I wanted to cry.

So I hadn't found the site of the old mansion of the Yu family, but I’m sure it was not the only one that lay beside the city electric lines near Donshengmen. Yet I was correct that the grounds where I had been were ancient and regal and somehow haunted.

As beautiful as the spot still was, its reason for existence had disappeared and what remained was a shadow of its past magnificence.

Early in his account of his Peking Story, David Kidd tells about fourteen incense burners that had never cooled once in five hundred years. Cast from Burmese red copper and ground Turkestan rubies during the Ming dynasty, the burners were lit when they were still warm from the kiln, "magical objects, glowing and shimmering like jewels, no two alike. Some were red; others were speckled with iridescent green or with twinkling bits of ruby or gold. One had a smooth gold surface, incredibly bright and shining." But, Kidd's wife told him, "Once the burner is allowed to grow entirely cold, the color fades and no later heat can bring it back."

A spiteful servant, after being scolded, poured water in each of the burners in revenge--"five centuries of tending and firing wiped out in the space of seconds." They were still of exquisite shape but "all the color and life was gone."

(Peking Story by David Kidd is published by Eland. It was originally published in England by John Murray in 1961 under the title All the Emperor's Horses. Kidd was nineteen when he first came to China in 1946; he left at the age of twenty-two.)

Hard Traveling--Part Two

2011-07-09T20:52:00.000-07:00

I was aching with every jouncing kilometer but I knew I wasn't the only one in pain. The man who sat astride the seat of what was essentially a three-wheeled motorcycle took the brunt of what I was beginning to think had to be a portion of the Ho Chi Minh trail. When he had stopped to buy water, he flexed fingers that had been poised in a deathgrip on the tuktuk's handlebars. He grimaced a little and then smiled.

By the time we reached Huen Hin, the tuktuk had stopped several times. What was an interesting trip for me was quite possibly a livelihood-jeopardizing experience for the man who had agreed to bring me to this place. Tuktuks weren't designed for this sort of journey and people we had passed along the way had gaped at the one we rode in as though we were ambling past on an elephant. There had to be a good reason why the other vehicles on the road were motorcycles or vans, and I began to realize the selfishness of what I had asked for. At the end of our time together, I'd walk away with a story and a collection of sore muscles; the man I was with could be faced with several days of unemployment while his tuktuk was under repair. Under the circumstances, a dollar a mile didn't seem an exorbitant price for me to pay.

As we walked through a battered gateway into a tree-encircled clearing, I said, "This is a bad road and it's not good for the tuktuk. I think two thousand baht is better than fifteen hundred." The man beside me looked at me and nodded, "Two thousand baht--I'll take you to That Phone before we go back to Savannakhet--and we'll return on a better road. It's longer but it will be better."

Huen Hin was a jumbled collection of the huge square blocks of rock that the Khmer had used for building in this part of their empire. Here they found laterite that could be carved from the earth in moist slabs that would harden to rock when exposed to the open air. Before the slabs became stone, holes were poked into them, which looked as though they probably held ropes that allowed men to pull them to the building site.

At least here the site was flat, instead of the dramatic hillsides upon which many of the temples had been built. Huen Hin was supposed to have been a resthouse for travelers, not a sacred place that needed the cosmology of Mount Meru. And yet the spot upon which it had been placed was peaceful and lovely, surrounded by tall, leafy trees that almost blocked out the sky and with the Mekong River flowing past at the edge of the site. Clumps of stones dotted around the clearing indicated that once this might have been a large complex of buildings and the entrance to the surviving structure was marked by stones bearing carved naga, the seven-headed cobra.

Only one side of the building had steps that were easy for me to climb so I ignored the steeper approaches and walked toward an inner chamber. There was the man who brought me here, offering sticks of incense to a rather motley collection of mismatched Buddhas. Somehow they were more moving than any of the original statues would have been; it looked as though each had been presented to this spot by different sojourners who brought what they could afford. Quietly, so I wouldn't disturb the man who stood in front of me, I sank to the ground and offered an unvoiced thanks for my opportunity to be in this room, in this place.

We walked out to the edge of one of the steep set of rocks that jutted narrowly to serve as steps and I shrank back. "I'll go out the other way," I said but the man beside me shook his head. "You can, come on," he told me, and held out his hand.

We came down one rock at a time, and steadied by his grip, I felt not a flicker of the vertigo that usually assaults me on a downward climb. At the bottom, he went off to a pile of stones for a cigarette and I walked toward the river. I was beginning to wonder who I was with, this man who had swiftly poured some of the water from the bottle he'd purchased onto the road before he took a drink himself and who told me what to do without making my hackles rise.

I walked back to where he was and sat on a rock nearby. "This is a beautiful place," I said. "Yes, he agreed, "the trees are beautiful, the river too. There's nature here." "So much nature in Laos; it's different from Thailand," and he replied "Thailand has money. Laos has," he gestured towards the trees, 'This is good."

And as I looked at him, I knew that, given enough time, he was someone I could love. Or was it what he had made it possible for me to see that I was falling in love with? Was I in love with the long, curving boat that I saw men carving by the roadside, under a canopy, protected from the sun, shaping and hollowing the trunk of a very tall tree? Was I in love with the herds of bony cows, watched over by boys who lived in a different century from the one I inhabited? Was I in love with the houses painted in soft colors with contrasting trim, their porches encircled by a curving cement balustrade, or with the simple wooden houses with arched, shuttered windows and carved doors? Or was I falling in love with this man, not young, with a clear and steady gaze, the patience to talk to me in a language that belonged to neither of us, and the kindness to help me down a path that I was afraid of?

I muddle these things together all of the time; I often find it hard to know where my love for a place bleeds into my feelings for a man. This man? This place? I will never know but I will always wonder.

Hard Traveling--Part One

2011-07-08T19:07:00.000-07:00

A butterfly joined me for breakfast, flexing and flirting its pale green wings inches away from my coffee cup while I pondered whether I wanted to go exploring or sit near the Mekong all day to watch sunlight play with the river currents. The day before I had taken a tuktuk to a stupa built in the glory days of the Khmer Empire. The driver had been young and speedy; my right arm still ached from clutching the side of the vehicle, bracing myself for a possible collision.

Still undecided, I walked to the river, where local tuktuk drivers relaxed and waited for customers. "Two thousand baht," one of them said, when I asked how much to go to Huen Hin, the Stone House, the ruins of a rest house that dated back to the turn of the twelfth century, "It's fifty kilometers away."

Sixty dollars seemed a stiff price for a roundtrip of a little more than sixty miles, and the man's attitude was off-putting.

"Not today," I decided and went back to the Sala Savanh.

"How much would it be for a tuktuk to Huen Hin?" I asked the boy who had served me breakfast. He agreed that two thousand baht was exorbitant and made a phone call. "Is a motorcycle okay?" he asked, "One thousand baht."

I shrugged. I had resolved to avoid long-distance motorcycle travel after being almost immobilized for a week after a jaunt from Paxse to Champasak when I was a couple of years younger, but it was a beautiful day and "All right," I agreed.

Soon a motorcycle pulled up, driven by a man who smelled like six months worth of stale cigarette smoke. His smile revealed a scanty collection of teeth and he moved with the stiffness of an arthritis sufferer. He's old so he'll be cautious, I told myself and perched behind him, trying not to feel apprehensive.

His wife had no such qualms about revealing her doubts about our proposed journey when we stopped at the driver's house to pick up motorcycle helmets. Her harangue was echoed by her daughter, but the old man ignored them both. Handing me a helmet, he jerked his head toward the motorcycle and off we went.

But not very far--after a few kilometers, his phone rang and at the end of the call he turned to me and said "I have to go back, okay?" I thought he had forgotten some crucial requirement for our journey, but when we arrived back at his house, his wife led us to their garage and a huge farm truck that was easily of the same vintage as her husband. "This is better; go in the truck," she ordered. The old man moved toward the driver's side, looking as though he might burst into tears.

Back at the riverbank, I was now fully determined to go to Huen Hin, and was equally determined to pay no more than the fifteen hundred baht that Miss Darling at Lin's Cafe had just told me was a fair price for a tuktuk. None of the drivers who surrounded me seemed to agree with her so I resorted to passive-aggressive bargaining. "It's okay. I don't want to go today--maybe next time," and I turned to walk away.

"Okay, okay--fifteen hundred baht," the tuktuk spokesman agreed and called to a knot of drivers who were watching from across the road. One of them sauntered toward us, a man wearing clean but ripped Levis who looked a lot like an older version of Tony Leung. Nodding in agreement, he led me to his vehicle.

"Five hundred baht," he said when we pulled into a gas station and I watched him hand one-third of his prospective earnings to the attendant. After a quick stop at a house where he filled a plastic bottle with water from a tap, our journey began.

Soon we were on a road where the recent rain had battered deep potholes into the coarse gravel that had been strewn over red dirt. I could smell wood-smoke, sun-heated earth, the sweet, clean smell of grass and leaves, and as we passed an occasional farmhouse, the unmistakable odor of fresh manure. Once in a while, a sharp jolt of citrus hit my nostrils and I tried unsuccessfully to find its source as we bounced away from the scent.

People wearing ski-masks and shorts planted rice seedlings in paddies that escaped the precision of their counterparts in Thailand, taking on the outlines of trapezoids, rhombuses and shapes I'd not encountered in elementary geometry. As a breeze rippled the sun-dappled water, the rice shoots looked as though they were dancing in the heat--or perhaps it was our tuktuk that was dancing, manically jouncing past small craters in the road and over little bridges that provided painful bumps as we began and finished each crossing.

This road was very familiar to me. I had spent my earliest childhood hating to ride in the family Jeep because traveling in 1950s Alaska meant journeys as bone-rattling as this one was turning out to be. I clutched the side of the tuktuk with white-knuckled hands to keep from falling to the floor and the driver's body was in constant motion as he tried to avoid the holes that peppered the track that we followed. The tuktuk lurched and bounded over every inch that its tires hit; it rattled ominously and I wondered how it and we would weather the return trip. Fifty kilometers on paved roads and fifty kilometers on what I was positive was a portion of the Ho Chi Minh Trail were completely unrelated in any way. I began to remember childhood trips of seventeen miles and back that took all day, and the time my father drove into a pothole that proved to be a ravine.

We stopped at a little roadside shop and the driver said, "No, stay here," when I got up to join him as he walked over to it. He returned with two bottles of cold water and handed one to me; I held it in my aching hands as he rotated his shoulders and cracked his neck.

"Are you okay?" he asked and I replied, "Yes, but is the tuktuk?'

"We'll go back to Savannakhet on another road," he told me and I felt a surge of relief until he resumed our odyssey and we passed a roadside sign. We had traveled a little over ten kilometers and had thirty-nine more spine-crushing ones to go.

Searching for the Puzzle Pieces

2011-07-07T21:06:00.000-07:00

I travel to see how other people live their lives in places profoundly different from where I live my own. It's a form of voyeurism, as well as the most seductive kind of drug that I have ever experienced. My earlier stay in a hotel designed for tour groups on overnight stays had left me completely clueless about life in Savannakhet, but this time the town plaza was practically my front yard. As I sipped coffee in the early morning sunlight, a woman of my vintage came out with a tub of food scraps for a cluster of dogs and across the way another woman bearing food was greeted expectantly by a feline family. Small children swooped about on their bicycles like swallows on wheels as several monks filed past them rather cautiously. A young man pulled himself down the street near the sidewalk; sitting on the ground, he propelled himself forward using the only leg he had. He looked at me with dull eyes as I pushed a banknote into one of his hands.

At a lovely little refuge called Lin's Cafe, I had found a surprising selection of leaflets for travelers, in English, with thumbnail photos and clear, simple maps. Although sightseeing isn't my favorite diversion, I am besotted with Khmer ruins and the Savannakhet area had two, far enough away to let me see a bit of the countryside if I went to them. And, the young woman who ran the cafe told me, the gorgeous church near the plaza offered Mass every Sunday. I'd avoided Catholicism strenuously for almost fifty years but Mass in the People's Democratic Republic of Laos was too enticing to pass up.

It was hard for me to tell what was making me more euphoric--the sunlight that had been elusive for months in Bangkok yet flooded the leaves of Savannakhet's trees with translucent light, or the privileged status of being the Sala Savanh's only guest? Or was it breakfast in the garden sala, coffee in a china pot and a baguette wrapped in a white cloth, two small bananas sliced with a mandoline to create elegant serrated edges and drizzled with dark honey? Or was it the small puzzle that was Savannakhet, a post-colonial river town with an affluent side to its decaying grandeur? New cars were parked in front of large, freshly painted modern villas; several stores had a profusion of refrigerators and washing machines for sale, and Cafe Chez Boune in the morning was filled with prosperous- looking men wearing white shirts, speaking Chinese and drinking leisurely cups of coffee.

On my second morning, I heard voices singing from within the church and took my place in one of the pews. Nuns dressed in white, beautifully groomed men, women and children, an adult male acolyte in white robes and a priest with green vestments sang the Mass in Lao, a symphony of prayer and response. Parishioners read the Gospels in Laos and Vietnamese, a nervous young teenage girl taking her turn at the lecturn. The line for Communion was headed by the nuns, followed by old women, then the younger, and finally the men. An echo of Buddhist and Hindu ritual pervaded the church at the beginning of the Mass, when the priest walked down the center aisle of the church, sprinkling water on the kneeling congregants from a bundle of green leaves dipped in a silver bowl of water held by the acolyte. A breeze wafted through open shutters from one side of the church to the other, keeping the interior cool and an open door tempted small children from the pews to play under the trees nearby.

When I walked down a small and quiet street back to the Sala Savanh, I passed a row of people on the opposite side of the street, in the shade of a decrepit building, each of them eating an ice cream cone. One of them greeted me and assured me that my sunny side of the street was too hot. "I like heat," I said and then asked if their ice cream was delicious. The overall assessment was that it was very good indeed. Not the sort of dialogue that Noel Coward would kill for, but nice and pleasant and for me completely Savannakhet--a place where I speak more Thai in three days than I do in three months in Bangkok, simply because I'm not politely ignored.

In Thailand when I say something in Thai, I usually get The Look, a mixture of incomprehension, boredom and condescension. In Savannakhet when I say something in Thai, I get a look of surprised delight and then a conversation, as basic as it may be. A crucial part of life falls into place for me here; I like this town, I decided.

A Second Look

2011-07-07T17:16:00.000-07:00

I was in a taxi, inching my way down a narrow, congested road that was far too small to handle the post-rainstorm traffic that was struggling to get to Bangkok's busiest bus terminal. I had missed my bus, was annoyed at the thought of buying another ticket, and was in no mood to answer my phone--but I did. A man's voice rattled out a long string of rapid and purposeful Thai that I couldn't keep up with. I handed the phone to my taxi driver, with a murmured plea for help.

His voice brightened audibly as he responded with information on our whereabouts and he smiled as he gave me back my phone. "The bus is waiting for you," he told me, and we both relapsed into happy shock as we pulled into the entrance to the bus terminal. A man grabbed my bag as I opened the taxi door and my cab driver wished me luck, too bemused to quote the fare. I jammed more bills than the meter asked for into his hand before following my luggage into the night and onto the bus.

The woman who had sold me my ticket to the Thai/Laos border had asked me for my phone number as we completed the transaction and I'd thought it was merely another manifestation of Thai bureaucracy in action. I'd been tempted to make one up for her and now I was deeply glad that I hadn't. As the bus inched its way out of Bangkok and then began rocketing down the highway, I felt so happy and grateful that I didn't care that I was unable to sleep.

I'd been careful to leave on Thursday evening, before the flood of voters began their odyssey to their home provinces to cast a ballot in a crucial and highly emotional election. Although this year for the first time ever, people from other parts of the Kingdom had been able to cast absentee ballots in Bangkok, many were eager to go home for the weekend, especially since--as I discovered later--Friday had been declared a holiday and Thailand faced a three-day weekend. Buses that we passed on the road were packed with travelers and I was even more thankful that my bus had waited for me.

This was my last visa trip before I returned to the States, and I'd decided to return to Savannakhet, even though it had been less than enticing when I'd gone there several months before. This time I brought reading material, including two big fat police stories by Jo Nesbo, and my netbook so I could work during what I knew would be a long, lethargic Laos weekend.

I had a reservation at a place called the Sala Savanh, a French villa that had previously been the site of the Thai Consulate-General, At least I'd have a modicum of colonial grandeur to wallow in before I left town on Monday afternoon, unlike the stark and dirty surroundings of the hotel I 'd stayed in during my last sojourn in this unprepossessing little spot, I told myself. The online photos of the place had looked promising and it claimed to have free wifi. Given the wretched, stormy weather that had engulfed all of SE Asia and had my Bangkok Internet only intermittently useful, I wasn't counting on any wifi in a town that looked as though it had just received the blessings of electricity the week before.

By the time I dropped off my visa application, was found by a tuktuk and entered the Sala Savanh, I was soaked through to my liver and my shoes I knew would never be the same again. A narrow, curving wooden staircase led me up to a little landing where double doors let me into my room. All I noticed was a bed and a hotwater heater in the bathroom; stripping off my saturated clothes, I savored the luxury of a hot shower in a bathroom that had no urinal and a bed that let me stretch out at length. This is why I take buses, I decided, it makes me appreciate life's most basic pleasures. Then I fell into the silence that engulfed me and slept.

Not only was the Sala Savanh wonderfully quiet, it was within walking distance of the river, the Thai consulate and the city plaza, which was long, bare, and bordered with places to eat, including a sidewalk cafe that served comfort food with a strong French accent. A picturesque Catholic church sat at the far end of the square and in the afternoon rain, women wearing traditional Lao skirts drifted past on bicycles, steering with one hand, the other holding an umbrella. The sound of crickets and children's voices filled the cool afternoon air and I savored that as much as I did my frites and Beer Lao. Houses in soft shades of pistachio, mint green, pale indigo, sky blue, mustard gold, and fading cream were my view when I watched the approach of twilight from the Sala Savanh's covered verandah, along with a forest of vintage TV antennas sprouting from rusting tin roofs, silhouetted against the darkening sky.

I tucked the mosquito net to make a snug canopy around my bed, put my netbook on a little wooden writing table, and tried the wifi. Even though the rain still fell in relentless drips, the Internet was slow but sure and the small vases on my bedside tables held tiny bouquets of green leaves. When I reached out to touch them, I was amazed and delighted that they were real. I misjudged this place when I was here before, I realized just before I was caught up in another wave of deep and restful sleep.

As the Page Turns

2011-06-06T00:25:00.000-07:00

I work for a small press that publishes books about Asia. We take chances on unknown writers, edit them carefully, pay them a lump sum, and put their words into beautiful trade paperback editions that have weight and substance. We keep our titles in print and we pay for sales reps to present our books across the United States and Canada. So far none of our books have made a profit for us, but we continue to publish books that we believe are well-written and well-illustrated.

We should be an author's dream, right? Wrong.

This is what I hear from writers:

1) What! No royalties????

2) What! You only pay that much for a manuscript?

3) What! You don't have sales reps in the UK? South America? Cambodia?

4) What! You expect me to rewrite my blog pieces so they will make a coherent and logical book?

5) What! You won't send me on a nationwide book tour?

6) What! You expect me to revise my work?

7) What! You've deleted my prose in this spot?

8) What! You don't have a marketing department?

These are direct quotes except for the two words that usually follow What...

And in answer to these heartfelt cries of anguish, I have a brief reply:

Self-publish as an e-book. Consider print-on-demand and consignment sales. Take two aspirin and don't call me in the morning.

I am a writer. I've also been a bookseller at a store that is known to be one of America's best. I buy books for pleasure reading. I work for this small press and I am published by it too. I have covered just about every inch of this waterfront, which by the way, is not dead yet.

I have friends who were published by major houses, were paid a lot of money, and now have books that are out of print. I have friends who were published by major houses as paperback originals and saw their words put on grainy paper with cheap, curling covers. For me, it means a lot for my books to stay alive and to look as though they are worth more than a damn to the business that brought them into the world.

But that's me--and I am clearly an idealist. I still believe in books as physical objects that deserve respect. But that respect has to come from all sides of the publishing spectrum. It's not match.com--publishers are not Prince Charming on that white horse, out to make every dream come true. But if we work together, we can make your book come true--in a way that makes everybody proud. Probably not rich or famous but proud to say, "See that book? That's mine."

All the News All the Time

2011-06-02T22:08:00.000-07:00

For the past fourteen years, when I have lived in Thailand, I've lived in the same neighborhood, and during that time the same woman sold me a paper any time I wanted one. Long after other stalls gave up on selling Bangkok's two English language newspapers, this lady continued to carry them. She looked rather gleeful when I told her she was the only person who now did. And when I came back from a trip to Laos, ecstatic to see newsprint in my language again, she looked almost as happy as I did.

She was on the sidewalk every day for the entire day, behind her little cart, owning that portion of the street. She always looked old from the first day I saw her until the day she told me it was her last as a newsstand proprietor. "I'm sick," she said, "I'm old."

"I'll miss you," I said, and I do. It's difficult for me to go to that part of my neighborhood now; part of my world has been diminished. One of the people with whom I've shared a history of sorts is gone and a piece of the fabric that tied me to this spot in the city has frayed. My community is fading, both with people departing and places transforming into something I wish they hadn't.

This street has several gigantic estates, with a thick green canopy of leaves rising above the walls that conceal them from the rest of the neighborhood. I've peered through the gates of these places for years, fantasizing about someday having one for my own. Then came the day that the gates swung open on the greenest of these compounds and the trees came down. My heart broke.

There are four air-conditioned restaurants on this street now, all of which serve mediocre food, often thawed and heated in a microwave. There are precious few people who make food in a wok--and when I think about it, I can't blame those who've stopped using one. It's hot and hard work, with fumes from frying chile and garlic that have to damage the lungs and eyeballs of whoever is frying them. Nonetheless, the stinging fragrance of sizzling food is one I never thought I wouldn't smell on the street of my neighborhood.

The tapping of sticks that heralded the approach of an itinerant noodle-seller, the mournful call of the kouay-chai man, the little Bozo-the-clown horn that meant ice cream was on its way were all sounds of my street which I rarely, if ever, hear now. Life is change, and it is changing all around me. It makes me realize that what I thought made this place home was merely cosmetic; more and more I feel as though my neighborhood has gone away, leaving me behind.

A friend who lives in the heart of Bangkok told me his neighborhood holds everything--department stores, supermarkets, hotels for visiting guests, bars, bookstores, fleshpots, Middle Eastern enclaves--the list could fill a Webster's Unabridged. It's an urban and urbane spot; highrises soar and so do the prices of meals in many of the restaurants. When many people think of Bangkok, they think of this part of the city.

My neighborhood holds Thailand. Resolutely without sophistication and largely homogeneous, it's a spot where the opening of a new convenience store means every street urchin gets a helium balloon and where a pair of shoes can die within a month because there are damned few sidewalks. Ancient food carts serve up delectable meals in surroundings of dubious hygiene. The same fat dog sprawls on the same sidewalk every day, forcing pedestrians into the street, taking up more room with each passing year.

But it's a village encircled by highrises and will eventually become indistinguishable from the rest of Bangkok--international, glitzy, on the move. There will be a Big C complex where now the huge food market sets up three times a week and condos will have sprouted where the trees tower behind walls. And residents in that future- to- come will buy their copy of the Bangkok Post or the Nation or even the International Herald Tribune as part of the way that life is meant to be, never knowing that once in this neighborhood, these could only be purchased from one stout little newsstand owner, a lady who kept on going until she no longer could.

Keith and Me

2011-05-28T20:05:00.000-07:00

I was recently given Keith Richards' Life on (numerous) CDs and have spent many evenings listening to decadent rock-and-roll anecdotes as bedtime stories. Aside from one or two crazy dreams, I came away with a realization that Keith and I have a bond between us--we both were scarred by vicious dentistry in our formative years.

If I had grown up fifty years later, my mouth wouldn't be in this condition. Now dentists don't inflict pain and in Bangkok at least they are the most soothing people I've ever encountered. I've started to approach the chair of torture without wanting to vomit and with normal blood pressure levels. I'm actually looking forward to next Sunday when my temporary crown is installed and my IQ visibly soars from 5 points to numbers that indicate that I just might know my ABCs.

Yet even without pain and with a dental bill that amounts to 130 US for this latest phase of repair, I still returned home with the sort of energy that's usually associated with Raggedy Anne. Dental drills, their noise and vibration, immediately take me back to Marathon Man; every fiber and muscle in my body clenches against them in an insane form of isometrics and I leave the office limp and exhausted and absurdly wanting to cry.

Bad teeth are the highest form of deadly sin in the Western world. They are a class indicator and a badge of low self-esteem and a symptom of sloth, all rolled into one. People who have never known sadistic dentists look at the generation that Keith Richards and I share and make some rapid snap judgments based upon the attractiveness of a smile. People without dental insurance learn how to conceal the sins within their mouths, or reveal themselves without shame.

"I smile with my mouth closed," a seventy-year-old friend told me, and I replied, "I forget." Keith Richards smiles without revealing his lower teeth, which has to be a long-standing habit because if there's anyone who could afford good dental work...

I hope to be back in Seattle before whatever fragment of summer is alloted to that part of the globe has faded away for another nine months. Some of my deadly sins will be corrected, without pain, shame, or a small fortune involved. I'm blessed that this whole divergence from my well-laid plans happened in Bangkok, where my rent is reasonable, dentistry is affordable, and pain isn't part of the package.

My Big Fat Carbon Footprint

2011-05-26T20:20:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I needed to buy necessities for the ill-tempered little cat who lives with me, which I can buy in my neighborhood, along with ARS mosquito repellent mats, which I can't. Because the sky was grey and swollen and ominous, I decided a magazine would be a nice touch as well, and maybe a scoop of my latest addiction, tamarind ice cream.

There's only one spot where I could get all of these items in one place, a small supermarket that specializes in imported food and sundries like nicely designed tumblers from Denmark and Japanese food storage boxes. Much of what it proudly features, like cheeses and pre-made sushi, turns my stomach, and I've never succumbed to the packaged Italian cold cuts or the German sausages or the ham that ornaments the butcher counter. Still it is easy for me to spend a lot of money on very little when I go there and I usually stick to street food and necessities on my soi.

I left the place yesterday with two bags of purchases and a sinking feeling that I had spent way too much money on things that were far from necessary. When I got home, I pulled out my receipt and examined the things I carried.

I had spent 71 dollars US. For that sum, I came home with two tubes of toothpaste (one free in a buy-one-get-one offer), eye-makeup remover, Maybelline eyeliner, a bag of catfood, a bag of cat litter, ARS mosquito mats, the International Herald Tribune, the Atlantic Monthly, a jar of green olives, a box of guava juice, a pack of smoked salmon, a demi-baguette, a box of saltines, and a very small bottle of Absolut. And a big burlap save-the-earth bag to carry most of it.

I don't do this sort of nostalgic expat shopping very often and the expense once in a while I consider therapy but when on a whim I looked at where these things had come from, my guilt began to rise. Only the juice, the bread, the toothpaste and the ARS mats came from Thailand. The catfood was from the Philippines, the crackers from Korea, the litter from Germany, the olives from Spain, the eye makeup was from China and the remover was Swiss. The salmon came from Norway and the Absolut from Sweden. The only presence in that supermarket that was predominantly Thai were the customers. At the time I was there, I was the only farang.

Sometimes I am exhausted at the thought of a fresh market or even my neighborhood street stalls. Although I usually drink fresh orange juice squeezed by someone who lives in my neighborhood or beer brewed in Bangkok or its environs, and the yogurt, nuts, and packaged Mama noodles that I eat during a heavy rainstorm are all made in Thailand, and my meals are cooked by people whose faces I see every day, there are times that I will pay for food that is familiar and to be honest not very good.

The bread I ate yesterday tasted flat, the olives flabby with a vaguely chemical taste and the salmon was dismal. I paid for the revived memory of once eating this food in a place where it tasted good, in the company of people I love. And I cringe when I think of how much fuel it took for my nostalgia to be indulged for a few minutes. As much as it takes for the jasmine rice and fish sauce to come from Thailand and feed me almost every day when I am in residence in Seattle. It's a crazy way to live, and all over the world, people who can afford it live that way.

My 2 dollar scoop of tamarind ice cream was 100% Thai, and it was the only delicious part of my shopping extravaganza.

Small World, Big Reading List

2011-05-25T21:02:00.000-07:00

My friend Alan just sent an email to readers whom he knows, asking what their summer reading choices were going to be. I read it with my first cup of coffee and was immediately lost in longing, in memories, in the feeling of wonder that the thought of something good to read always brings to me.

The idea of summer reading is strange to me now because I live in endless summer--but in Bangkok we have the rainy season, which seems to get longer every year. Since a rainstorm hits my part of the city the minute I decide to leave my apartment, my rainy season survival kit includes a stack of books near my armchair and emergency rations in my pantry.

This year I will have both the rainy season in Bangkok and summer in Seattle--and different reading requirements for each. Then comes winter...

Summer reading lists are a very different selection of books from winter reading, or rainy season survival therapy. As I thought about books that have sparkled for me in the rare and treasured sunlight of the Pacific Northwest, I longed to browse the shelves of my favorite bookstore in the world, the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle. With a certain degree of Luddite skepticism, I typed the store's website into my browser and went to the page for staff recommendations. There waiting for me were old friends, people I've yet to meet, and hundreds of titles chosen because someone loved each and every one of them.

And my list began:

1. The Foremost Good Fortune by Susan Conley--a memoir chosen by a woman I've known for decades, the account of an American who moves with her family to Beijing and learns to live there--and then discovers she has cancer. As Beijing becomes more familiar to her, her own body becomes unknown terrain--and I cannot wait to read her story. (Thank you, Tracy.)

2. Atlas of Unknowns by Tania James--a first novel written by a writer I do not know, recommended by a woman I've never met, the story of two sisters in Kerala who are separated when one of them goes to school in New York City. Since I am one of a tribe of sisters, am in love with both South Asia and NYC, and was separated from my family while I went to school in Manhattan, this is a book that calls to me. (Hilary, thank you for spotlighting this so I could become tempted.)

3. Japanese Hot Pots by Tadashi Ono--yes this is a summer reading list but summer in Seattle is the equivalent to the cold season in Bangkok--and the food stalls that feed me here are nowhere to be found in the Northwest. I am going to have to relearn the art of cooking what I want to eat and this book, recommended by a good friend with the taste of MFK Fisher, is exactly what I am going to need--as soon as I get a kitchen. (Come for dinner, Karen?)

4. Vietnamerica: A Family's Journey by GB Tran--graphic novels are not my reading matter of choice but this one is too tempting to pass up. It's big and fat and colorful and visually enticing and it's here. My friend Chris lent it to me, along with The Windup Girl (which kept me up long past my bedtime for two nights in a row); it will be my first book of the summer--and quite possibly my favorite book of the rainy season.

5. And now eat your heart out, Yanks. Before I leave Bangkok, on my shelves will be River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh. Yes, the next volume in the Sea of Poppies trilogy will be out in the UK on June 6th, in India by June 17th and so it's safe to assume that it will be in Bangkok before I leave in July/August. (Tracy, Hilary, and Karen--I'll bring it with me so you can enjoy it too. It's only fair, after all...)

Traveling with The Lone Pilgrim

2011-05-11T20:34:00.000-07:00

There was a subversive side to Laurie Colwin. Six years after she idealized matrimony in Happy All The Time, she published a collection of short stories called The Lone Pilgrim. It's dangerous to speculate on any writer's life based upon their fictional output, but I think it's safe to say that only someone who was alive and young in the '60s could have written those stories.

These are dark little gems; they gleam; they do not sparkle. "The Achieve of, the Mastery of the Thing" is one of the funniest stories I have ever read; it's also the closest that Laurie Colwin ever came to cruelty. The page and a half that she allows for a drug dealer named Uncle Marv to deliver his speed-rap sales pitch has the poetry and idiocy that many of us remember all too well. And as the narrator ends with "Suddenly I was full of optimism and hope for the future," Altamont and Kent State and Charles Manson peer out through the sentence.

This is a writer who refuses to believe in innocence, "that witless spontaneous affection, that hungry purposeless availability." For Laurie Colwin, there are people who plunge into the world straight on and others who approach it in baby steps; some girls have "money instead of imagination and complete self-confidence" and some, even in childhood, recognize the polished and seductive charm described in "Delia's Father." "One false move and you lose everything," says the girl who, with one kiss, "crosses over to my side of the street forever." And in "A Girl Skating," a poet mercilessly deflowers the child he loves without ever needing to touch her. "I was the child he loved best. There was no escaping him," but it was "the infant seriousness" that froze the girl into place in poems. Without her intelligence, she would never have known that this attention kept her from having a life that was "entirely unremarkable and happy."

Happy is a word that Laurie Colwin uses a lot and as she shows who is truly happy in her fiction, Misty and Vincent, Holly and Guido take on a sinister luster. They are abandoned to what kind of a future when they "raised their glasses and, by the light of the candles, they drank to a truly wonderful life." The candles are beeswax, the glasses hold champagne and when it is gone, "they were suddenly sad." Thank heaven Vincent brought an extra bottle--but will there always be enough champagne?

The final story in The Lone Pilgrim, "Family Happiness" shows what happens to smart people in happy marriages. So does "A Mythological Subject" and "Intimacy" and "A Sentimental Memory." Nobody has ever written so rationally about infidelity than Laurie Colwin. Her characters, with the fine emotional geiger counters that they have within their hearts, negotiate the hazards of adultery without damage and with few tears. An affair, Laurie Colwin suggests over and over, in short stories and in novels, is the secret to a successful marriage. It is simply another kind of love. It is not "full of the misery and loneliness that romantic people suffer in love."

Well-stocked pantries, well-ordered lives, well-placed objects, well-enjoyed meals: yet at the base of this glorious celebration of domestic living is a bullet aimed straight at the heart of monogamy. While making marriage look desirable, Laurie Colwin as much as anybody and more than most transformed it into an altered state, "a dark forest" filled with "a little chapel, a stand of birches, wolves, snakes, the worst you can imagine, or the best."

Happy All the Time

2011-05-10T22:07:00.000-07:00

I have no idea why this book has accompanied me through my life. For over forty years, when I first read it in a novella form in Redbook magazine, then as the longer novel that emerged in 1978, I have loved Laurie Colwin's Happy All the Time with a fierce and unconditional passion. I have bought and given it away more times than I can count. When I have lived without it for a few years, I have to buy it again--most recently at the beautiful new site of Seattle's Elliott Bay Book Company. I knew it would be there, waiting for me, under a slant of sun from the store's skylight, and it was.

I've read it as a young mother in Fairbanks, Alaska, as a woman living out a long-delayed adolescence in her forties, and as a sixty-plus expat in Bangkok. It has always absorbed me and delighted me and I have never asked why--until now. I don't love romantic novels that sparkle on the surface and have very little plot. I don't usually cherish characters who speak in short, crisp, almost utilitarian sentences. And I would detest any one of the four central figures in this book should I ever meet them off the page.

Guido Morris, Vincent Cardworthy, Holly Sturgis and Misty Berkowitz are all in their own singular fashions, perfect. They are physically attractive, accomplished and they can cook. They love fine art--in fact their lives are works of fine art. Each of them could be a small jade figurine. They fall in love and they marry and they "keep the ugly, chaotic world at bay." Their Manhattan is one of charming little restaurants and dark, genteel bars and the occasional museum. Even parenthood is perfection. Why are they not absurd? Or at least very, very dull?

Perhaps because Misty and Holly are perfect but they are difficult--and proud of it. "I am the scourge of God," Misty tells Vincent. "I was made for Attila the Hun." Holly, Guido comes to understand, is "Genghis Khan in emotional matters." And so is Laurie Colwin.

This is a writer who takes as her territory an entire Great Lake of thin ice and skates on it with aplomb and complete enjoyment. Her plot is romantic, her men would like to be, her women never are. In what should be a paradise of happily ever after, her heroines are equipped with a detached and loving irony that pervades and eventually takes over the entire book.

So does a gentle and laser-beamed satire. Although never focused upon the two couples whose book this is, the peripheral figures in their lives are fleeting and unforgettable. They are skewered and examined and put aside, without cruelty or caricature. Alive and indelible, they glitter in some undiscovered universe, waiting for their own novel.

Laurie Colwin specialized in that. A short story would become two or three, all with the same characters, then a novella, then a novel. Her gift was to provide the full bodies for her characters within the first story. The details came later, and when they did, the people they embellished were remembered as old friends--"Now where did I meet you? You're the one who takes off your gloves with your teeth."

Her books sparkle and gleam and at first they seem all patina, no core. They're much like the novels of another woman who said of her own writing, "the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory." Yet hundreds of years later, Jane and Bingham, Elizabeth and Darcy, still pull readers to their pages again and again and again. So do Guido and Holly, Vincent and Misty, in a fairy tale with an edge, in a satire laced with deep and abiding love.

More Than I Can Chew

2011-05-10T01:45:00.000-07:00

Dentistry is a huge component of Bangkok's medical tourism; there are almost as many dental establishments in this city as there are beauty shops. Yet unlike beauticians, dentists usually specialize in signs that are bilingual, making me understand that I'm not the only foreigner who has ever needed one in a hurry. But hurry has not been a hallmark of my dental adventure; gentleness has.

In the past week I spent five hours in a dentist's chair with my mouth wide open, listening without comprehension to Thai talk radio. At the end of my third visit, I was told that my root canal was completed and to return for my post and core on the 28th. That was 18 days away, which means I have 2 1/2 weeks of roaming about with a gap on the left side of my mouth.

However, that five hours of dental attention cost me 200 dollars US, including somewhere around six x-rays. And I didn't have to take so much as an aspirin for any pain later on. And the anesthetic wore off within a half-hour or so of my visit, with no fat-lip syndrome.

It's a trade-off--time versus money, efficiency versus pain. I never thought of culture influencing medical care but it does. I was visiting a friend in Bangkok's leading hospital; behind the curtain that divided the room into a two-bed unit, a pretty Thai girl disappeared and then many happy giggles and murmurs and sighs and tiny moans formed a backdrop to the conversation that my friend and I were having. Not something I'd be likely to hear in the states, but why not?

My upcoming post and core will cost me 100 US; my temporary crown will be 30 dollars. The time estimate is four to five visits, which I now know can take from an hour and a half to two hours. If I'm lucky, they will be back-to-back the way my root canal visits were, but I have no idea if I'm going to be lucky that way. However, I know I can afford the time that this will take and I'm feeling confident that it isn't going to hurt me. That alone is worth a lot.

There are dental clinics in the expat areas of town where doubtless these procedures are done in a more timely fashion, to satisfy the demanding schedules of Westerners with deeper pockets than mine. I am receiving care in the dental office of a private hospital, which has equipment of the highest standards in a setting that manages to be both professional and home-like at the same time--a Hello Kitty organizer sits on the counter beside a gleamingly sterile sink. It is far beyond the neighborhood clinic which was my first foray into Thai dental care, as doubtless Bumrungrad and the expat clinics are beyond the hospital I've chosen. We all find our comfort levels somehow.

The lessons that accompany this time of my life aren't altogether comfortable. In my impatience to be finished with this, I confront the willfulness that has governed my life. In my discomfort with the weeks of a gap in my mouth, I recognize the vanity I never thought I possessed. In my disappointment at the delay in my return to the states, I have to understand that leaving is what I have practiced all of my life. None of this is easy; all of it is probably valuable. It slowly becomes clear, under this clouded Bangkok sky.

The Party's Over, Part Three

2011-05-02T18:00:00.001-07:00

Yesterday the news overwhelmed me. I had to leave the Internet and go out into the world and walk in it.

Not too far from where I live is a Muslim restaurant, a place that welcomed me when I was having a difficult time with cultural adjustments and that has always been an oasis of diversity and tolerance for me. As I walked, I realized that was where I wanted to be.

Abu Ibrahim is a place that is dark and cool and clean. The food is very good; there is no alcohol. The man who runs it has seen me in the neighborhood for years; he knows where I live and where I'm from and we always have brief but warm conversations.

Yesterday I sat there in the company of two elderly Chinese-Thai gentlemen enjoying a leisurely coffee together, a tableful of ebullient Thai men having a feast, a Euro boy and his Southern Thai girlfriend, a couple of Middle Eastern men waiting for their take-out, three men from the Subcontinent being convivial over food, a young Thai couple, she texting on her mobile, he immersed in a magazine, as they sipped their lassis, and a gigantic multi-generational Sino-Thai family embarking on a holiday lunch. I ate my dal and butter naan, sipped my freshly squeezed lemonade, drank the bottle of water that Abu Ibrahim gives to each table, and thanked every lucky star I've ever seen glowing in the night sky for this place of kindness and nourishment in a turbulent world.

The Party's Over, Part Two

2011-05-01T18:36:00.000-07:00

I really don't think it's revealing a Western bias, because the people I see in waiting rooms at Paolo Hospital are all Thai except me, but I like bright, sparkling, well-lit medical facilities--a lot. And I like doctors who are willing to be precise about time frames and costs and what needs to be done. I like the dentist who spent time with me and was patient with my questions early yesterday morning.

She and a colleague can replace my crown in less than two months, if we get started on it soon, for around the same price of the previous dentist's bridge and multiple extractions. Without the extractions.

I took 24 hours to ponder this. I walked up to a dentist's office that a good friend recommended. It was closed of course but I wanted to see the location. It's further from my apartment than Paolo. It is easily as attractive a set-up, at least as far as I could see through the windows. It may be marginally less but as far as I can tell from my internet research, every place has similar prices except for the ones that are stratospherically higher. I'm going to use Paolo.

I realized last night that going to the House of Beautiful Teeth was like stepping back in time to the dentist office I went to in the 60s in Anchorage, Alaska-- dark, utilitarian, and no nonsense. The dentist there took a global approach to my mouth rather than focusing on the one problem that was bothering me, and she did so from a position of what she felt was unassailable authority. She was the doctor; I was the patient. Recline. Rinse. Hold that mirror. What do you mean, you want an estimate of time and money? This is medical care, for heaven's sake.

The dentist at Paolo Hospital is in the provider/consumer mode. I want something done and she will do it--very, very well. Her office and equipment glisten; even the x-ray apron had a certain dash to it. I feel comfortable in that sort of place--or as comfortable as I possibly can be when faced with a root canal, a post and core, and a crown.

The typical expat mantra here is "Thai people pay less than farang," and conversely Thai people say "So expensive" when farang tell what they pay for services or goods. But the fact is "Some Thai people pay less than farang." The patients in the House of Beautiful Teeth were working class, for the most part, or very young neighborhood residents. They go there because it's convenient, because the dentist is personable and her staff is kind, because when it comes to dentistry, they are still stuck in the 1960 mindset.

I'm not and neither are the Thai people who wait with me at Paolo. If I have to eat ramen for the next two months, I'll do it in order to have my dental work done in the 21st century. And even in that setting and under those conditions, I will still have tears leaking from my tightly closed eyes.

The Party's Over, Part One

2011-04-30T22:12:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, while reading about the Royal Wedding, I lost a crown.

It just slipped right out of place as I was eating khao soi for breakfast and I slipped into shock. The implications of this were vast and slowly I began to understand what they all were.

The worst is facing up to my dental phobia, which has kept me from putting my money where my mouth is. That, coupled with an inherited talent for selective blindness, along with no insurance, has kept me from seeking the help that I badly need. Not something I'm at all proud of.

Next is the possibility that this will make me delay my trip back to the states. That alone is enough to engulf me in tears.

Then comes the question of where to seek treatment. Friends responded to Facebook and email cries for help and I began to google their recommendations. I decided that one private hospital was probably much like the others--except for Bumrungrad which is the gold standard and approaches US prices--so made an appointment at Paolo Hospital, which is the only one I've ever frequented.

One of my dearest friends in Bangkok persuaded me to try a dentist on my street first and obediently I set off for the House of Beautiful Teeth. As I sat and waited for my turn to be seen, I could hear the sound of a drill, and an old man came out of an office with his mouth stuffed full of cotton gauze. I made myself sit still, rather than heading for the exit.

A receptionist took my blood pressure, twice. "High," she said, shaking her head. She led me to a room where I was beckoned into a reclining position on a classic 1950s dental chair. "Rinse" she said, pointing to a paper cup full of water. It tasted as though it had just come from a faucet and there was a green spot on the bottom of the cup.

"Hold this mirror in your left hand and look," the dentist ordered. I took one look at my sagging chin and let the mirror fall to my chest. I recognized this woman who was poking into my ravaged mouth. She was young and pretty but she had the stereotypical dentist's myopia--look at the teeth, forget the person who owns them.

As I reclined awkwardly at full-length, she began to enumerate my options in fast and flawed English. Her mouth was covered in a face mask, which made her words more difficult to hear; I suddenly realized how much of my understanding in this country was enabled by reading lips. But I understood the word "extractions" and sat bolt upright, reclaiming a small portion of my adulthood.

"Oral surgery," she said, "in a government hospital. They are very busy there, so it might take more than two months. Our government hospitals are very good, but they have many, many patients to take care of."

Her estimate for a bridge with four extractions hovered around 20,000 baht or around 689 US dollars. The price was right but the extractions in a government hospital was more total immersion than I ever wanted. And I was uneasy about extractions in general.

Perhaps we parted friends, but I didn't really care if we were, especially after she began to discuss my blood pressure. I could feel it rising to apoplectic levels as I made my exit.

The consultation was free. I would have gladly paid a fee if I could have rinsed my mouth in clean water.

The Life That Matters

2011-04-29T18:00:00.000-07:00

It all matters of course. But the lessons that I've learned in 2011, for the short time that this year has been in place, all point out that the life I have been given is a constant matter of choice. How I perceive the world around me, how open I am to the beauty of it, how I transmit what I am given, and most of all, where I spend the time I'm allotted depends on how open I am to signals of importance.

From the time I was 21 until I was 47, a large portion of my life was bound up with my children. For the 15 years that followed, I went exploring. Now as I approach 63, my search for home takes me back where I started from, with my family.

One of my first memories that holds speech is from when I was three and living in Mt. McKinley National Park as it was known then. Some older children came to our front door, told my mother that they were going exploring and asked if I could come along. "No," she replied, "Mikie's too little to go exploring." I think I eventually forgave her, but I've never forgotten.

I've learned that exploring can range wide on familiar ground or be quite narrow in exotic territory. "I have traveled a great deal, in Concord," Thoreau said, while backpackers spend their time in Bangkok in front of a computer screen or a TV blasting Western dvds. My own SE Asian explorations pale when compared to my friend Elizabeth, a woman who is a true nomad and adventurer. And yet I realized yesterday while on a bus, how much of Bangkok I have mapped by wandering through it over the past decade and a half. Although like any major city of the world, Bangkok changes constantly so there are always new spots to discover--it's why I love it so.

But more than I love Bangkok, or Thailand, or SE Asia, or the whole bloody continent itself, I love my kids. Take away my posterchild status of Menopausal Meanderer--rip the stripes of Seasoned Expat from my shoulders--I can live with that. I'll never make Mother of the Year either. But whether I'm in Bangkok returning to Seattle once a year, or in Seattle making an annual pilgrimage to Bangkok, I will always be an explorer, never too little nor too old.

A Clean, Well-lighted Place

2011-04-25T00:05:00.000-07:00

Yesterday a friend took me away from the hot, crowded, demented weekend market at Jatujak Park to the clean, orderly, coherent food market known as Aor Tor Kor. The minute we walked through the portals, I was in awe; "It's like Whole Foods," I babbled and indeed it was. The lighting was clear, the displays were artful, the aisles were spacious, the floors were clean--and the food swept as far as I could see, beautiful, luscious, perfect food.

Neither of us were hungry since we had already made a commando raid on Jatujak's food stalls and we both regretted it. Making plans to return later in the week, we wandered through still lifes of fruit and fish, as lovely as anything to be seen on Yaowarat Road at night but in gleaming, almost pristine surroundings instead of on a set for Blade Runner.

I woke up last night as thunder crashed and lightning flickered through my bedroom and the thought that was uppermost in my mind was it's too easy. We had wandered through a subway station tunnel where the food market's exit was clearly emblazoned on a wall graphic, we strolled past pretty little boutiques in the tunnel that were as colorful as they were well air-conditioned, and we emerged exactly where we wanted to be. This was not Bangkok as I had ever known it.

So of course today I had to go back on my own for breakfast. Heading directly for the beautiful glass case that displayed egg tarts like Tiffany jewels, I bought two. They were picture-perfect--yellow satiny filling enrobed in flaky Macau-style pastry. Tearing into the box the attendant had reverently placed them in, I pulled one out and took a bite.

I've had egg tarts in four cities: Hong Kong, Beijing, Penang and in Bangkok's Chinatown. I know what good ones taste like and this one was not of that ilk. The crust was flabby and damp; the filling was pallid and flavorless and without the lovely silken texture that keeps an egg tart from being baby-food. I tried the second with the same dismal discovery. "Disgusting," I shuddered as I looked for the nearest waste receptacle.

But ever an optimistic when confronted with beauty, I walked past packages of cut-up fruit, bags of prawn meat extracted from the shell, roast pork that made me salivate. I was on a mission. The day before my friend and I had passed a pan that was filled with hoy taud, the mussel and egg pancake that I love, and I had stifled a moan of disappointment that I had no appetite.I did now and I was going to find that pan.

I ordered and then looked for something to drink--there was guava juice, nam farang, the drink of my people. I sipped it as I waited for my food; it tasted nothing like the smaller bottles that I bought on the Skytrain platform that were filled with a tart juice with the distinct flavor of fresh guava. This was watery and bland like the boxed fruit juice that I had bought only once. Did they buy the boxed juice and pour it into bottles here, I wondered, or was it simply not fresh? It was wet; I finished it only because I could no longer bear to throw any more nourishment away.

I barely recognized the dish that finally came to my table. It was crisp, brown lace with a few minute bivalves poking through. It crunched in my mouth like cereal, leaving a fine overlay of oil in its wake that an hour later is still with me. As I left, I peered into the vat of batter that was the mainstay of my pancake. It looked like gruel, not the thick paste that I've seen in other places.

Aor Tor Kor is a beautiful place to visit. It's a fine spot for food photography but for eating? I'll take my chances on the street, thank you. Chaos and dirt are okay by me; I've tasted the alternative and I'll never do that again.

Loving Korat

2011-04-23T17:19:00.000-07:00

An elderly samlor driver shuffled in my direction, holding out a chopstick-load of thin, yellow noodles. I had learned long ago that Korat people were hospitable but this seemed over the top--besides, I'd already had my breakfast. He stopped inches away from me and bent toward the sidewalk, firmly gripping his chopsticks. There at his feet was a millipede and that was the recipient of the noodles.

"He likes them," the old man and I agreed, as the miilipede began to eat and the driver eased back into his vehicle to finish the rest of his own morning meal.

It had been late the night before when I tottered off the bus after a 12-hour journey. My split-second decision to avoid Cambodia in favor of Laos had taken me across a large portion of the north-east to a city I'd been to once a year or more ago. Exhaustion and incipient senility had blasted the name of the hotel I wanted to find there right out of my memory cells; it was an English name was all I could dredge up and I wearily and dubiously decided that it was called the President. Unfortunately none of Korat's taxi drivers agreed with me.

A desk inside the bus station was helmed by a young woman who looked as tired as I was, but she had a map of her city with a list of hotels and one of them was mine. Without my asking, she called the Thai Inter Hotel to nail down their address and made sure they had a room available for me; once again and almost immediately I fell back in love with Nakhon Ratchisima (nicknamed Korat.)

The Thai Inter Hotel has obviously been inspired by Thai International Airways; the staff wear uniforms that bear the cut and color of the Kingdom's flagship airlines and photos of planes adorn the hallways. Victor is the owner and a genial host. He cares about his hotel and that shows in the details. The Thai Inter is impeccable, with bright and pretty rooms, breakfast with butter that is of a spreadable consistency for the toast, bathrooms that include not only hot water but--are you ready for this? A shower curtain that is crisp and clean.

Korat, like Chiang Mai, was once a moated city and the old part of town is still surrounded by water that is clear. There are trees and a manageable amount of traffic and a stunning number of temples and people who are dazzlingly kind and the most imaginative and colorful graffiti in the Kingdom. When I'm there, I know I'm in Thailand and when I leave, I'm always looking forward to the next time I go back.

In My Life

2011-04-22T19:21:00.001-07:00

Ghostworld

2011-04-16T18:40:00.000-07:00

Where old replicants go to die...

Après le Deluge

2011-04-16T18:05:00.000-07:00

Songkran ended and the world around me began to take on a normal cast again. Water and good wishes had done their job--sunlight had returned and the sky was no longer white. Feeling the exhilaration that comes with the third and final New Year, I climbed on an ordinary bus (windows open, no aircon) and went off to Chinatown and the Indian section of the city.

Traffic was minimal, the air felt fresh, and our bus moved persistently and almost rapidly. When we got to the spot where all buses converge at Victory Monument, our driver felt no reason to slacken his pace. Faced with a minor traffic snarl, he took to the sidewalk and then back to the open road (well it was a more of a concrete island in the middle of the street, but even so...)

As we traveled along a leafy boulevard that was divided by a tree-shaded canal where people have set up basic living structures, a goat loomed into view and when I got off the bus, the woman who preceded me slapped a small hand towel on top of her head to fend off the heat of the sun. Suddenly I was no longer in Bangkok; I was in Thailand.

For the first time ever, the dark and claustrophobic halls of Sampeng Lane were empty with long, unpeopled corridors stretching toward a slant of light. The moshpit of the Pahurat market was easy to walk through as well and I headed into an almost vacant Indian Emporium. Post-Songkran, this beehive area of Bangkok had become my own little private, surreal world that I shared with only a very few people.

Clutching a little bag of samosas to take home for supper, I climbed into another unimpeded bus that reminded me of how much I miss by sticking to the subway and skytrain. Passing a food cart that featured thin slices of meat held in drying position by little pink, blue, and yellow clothespins, I made a New Year resolution that I would take a bus at least once a week in 2555.

Written in Water

2011-04-14T18:36:00.000-07:00

Anyone who thinks there's no revolution taking place in this country should go downtown and witness the latest battle on Silom.

With a certain degree of terror, I went there yesterday to see how my bookselling friend Victor (http://www.orchidbooks.com) was holding up with Songkran raging all around him. The subway I took was crowded with teenagers brandishing multi-colored water-fueled AK-47s, all headed to the same spot that I was. What they were wearing was barely tolerated on the beach when I first came to Thailand--skimpy shorts and tank tops and flipflops were only worn by my gay male friends in public at the turn of the last century. And even more surprising to me was that these kids weren't wearing their public masks of polite formality; they were goofing around as though they were in their own living rooms--and that to my barbaric American point of view looked great.

When we reached our destination, they headed for the open street while I took refuge in the skybridge walkway that links the subway to the Skytrain and to the shopping center where Victor works. As I peered cautiously over the edge, the only vendors on this sidewalk that is usually thronged with goods of all kinds were selling bottles of water and bags filled with pellets of compressed powder. The pavement itself was invisible, covered with moving bodies that were daubed with chalky powder that had been mixed with water to the consistency of whitewash.

The sounds of disco music pulsed through the crowd, and on the street in front of Burger King, was Soi 2 in broad daylight. In the olden days, this gay male enclave was a night world, even during Songkran--it didn't wake up until around 10 pm and nobody I knew went there much earlier than midnight. Its music and craziness and Songkran water warriors, who were more vicious than any I'd ever seen amywhere else in the city, all were concentrated in this short little alleyway, and its companion neighborhood of Soi 4. I often thought that was a shame because the life and color of this neighborhood could do a lot to liven up the rest of the city. And now it was.

As I watched, I realized that where the disco music played was where the heart of the Silom activity was going on--dancing, battling, flirting was all happening right there, like a mini-Mardi Gras--an integrated, uninhibited, full-tilt party. The teenagers moved through and beyond the noise and the funk and the warfare, slowly in an almost ritualistic procession, reaching out to smear each other's faces and bodies with paste, shooting and splashing and hurling water as they walked in an almost orderly fashion.

There had to have been thousands of them filing along this long main street where last year tires burned and people died. For the three days of Songkran, Silom was theirs. From all over Bangkok, these kids put on their most informal clothing and grabbed their water guns and shut down the heart of the city. Their numbers allowed Soi 4 to come out into daylight and be crazy, caused stores to shut down, and covered the street with a chalky, egg-shell, powdered finish.

This particular Songkran scene is light-years from the one I experienced two days ago on the canals. The teenagers I saw on Silom are almost a different species from the students I used to teach who seemed frozen into formality by a rigid code of etiquette. Thai culture is being transformed and transmogrified and where that will take the country is anybody's guess.

More than anywhere I have ever lived, Thailand is held together by family. The glue is that particular unit--starting from the very top, with the King's birthday celebrated as Father's Day. The grouping I saw yesterday was a unit I never saw before here--thousands of teenagers on the loose, taking a tradition and turning it inside out. These are the people who are going to determine the future of this country; they are going to change it.

I'm old enough to recognize and salute their energy, while also feeling very sad for what is being lost. And as I peered down into the disco inferno in front of Burger King, I was grateful for the privilege of being removed from all of that by the gift of age.

Victor, I discovered, had stayed home.

Water, Water Everywhere...

2011-04-13T19:09:00.000-07:00

Songkran, or Thai New Year, is a holiday that grumpy old people love to gretz about. Life as we know it comes to a screeching halt and is replaced by people brandishing water artillery and pots full of dirty water that comes from a gigantic plastic garbage can and buckets replenished at that same source. Two days ago, the best-selling item on Silom Road seemed to be plastic pouches for cameras, cell-phones and currency, presumably water-tight and all in brilliant flaming Crayola colors.

The small children on my street began their dress rehearsal for this festival two days early. Luckily I had already bought their friendship with Hello Kitty stickers and they let me pass by without saturation. I rewarded them the next day with gummy hamburgers and hotdogs, which mollified everyone of them except the baby. Never underestimate the brute determination of a two-year-old brandishing a garden hose.

"Come with us to Taling Chan," my friend Mrs. Nupa invited me. The outing fell on the first official day of Songkran when my life stretched in vast emptiness for the next three days, so I was delighted to accept--even though I wasn't sure of what the event would involve. There is a floating market at Taling Chan but only on weekends so that couldn't be our destination. Would we bathe Buddhas at a temple? Visit a family home in the country? It seemed rude to ask so I resorted to the indirect approach.

"When we go to Taling Chan, Mrs. Nupa, what should I wear?" She looked puzzled.

"Will we go to a temple in Taling Chan?"

"Maybe, if there's one on the way," she replied, still looking confused by my inquisition.

"What clothes should I wear to be polite?"

"Your usual ones," she assured me, "Yes, black is okay." But I knew Songkran was a time to wear bright and blazing colors and went off to find something in aqua, which seemed appropriate for this particular holiday.

We ended up at the Floating Market which was open for Songkran and Mrs Nupa’s husband immediately arranged for a canal boat ride, which is one of my favorite things to do. As we got in the boat, small children viciously bombarded us with waterfire and a man handed out plastic bags to all who wanted them. Mrs. Nupa tucked our handbags inside a plastic shroud, tying it tightly, and I considered getting one for my shoes, which were already soaked. I gave a brief and longing thought to the horrible flipflops that I'd bought on the beach at Samet, and then shrugged. Shoes are cheap in Bangkok.

We sped away from the small snipers and entered a world that's a century behind the one we live in. Houses bordered the edge of the canal, flowers and trees softened the banks on either side, and temples gleamed ahead of us. "Water on the left," the boat's helmswoman warned and handed out little buckets which were rapidly filled with canal water. And as we passed the temple grounds, we were hit by a wall of water, hurled by men, children, and very old ladies.

For two hours, that was our existence--throwing water from tiny beach buckets and being inundated by cannonades of water from the porches of houses, bridges that spanned the canal, other boats as they passed by, and from the sacred sanctuary of temple grounds. And it was fun--cold, soggy, and laughing, everybody on our boat was having a fabulous time, although a very little girl, wrapped in a towel like a baby burrito with a plastic bag tied over her hair, wasn't always sure that she was.

At the end of our journey, we dried as we ate riverine food--fish, cockles and shrimp--admitting to a strong urge for naps as we drove back home. I slept for two hours after a restorative warm shower. This morning my fingertips are no longer puckered and waterlogged but the sense of happiness remains. Sawatdee Phi Mai, took khon, happy Thai New Year to everyone in the world.

Time Forgot

2011-04-08T17:42:00.000-07:00

The front of the one-storey, dusty concrete building had a sign in English that said "Bookstore" so of course I had to walk in. A glass counter held pamphlets that looked as though nobody had touched them since they were first printed and probably with good reason. The closest wall held books in Laotian, one of which was a picture book of a bearded Russian who looked like a crazed forest monk capable of killing every last one of the Romanovs with his bare hands.

In the far corner of the room were women sitting on the floor and with very little hope I asked them if there were books in English. They beckoned to another wall. And there were English books--Lao/English dictionaries, workbooks for learning English, texts on Business English from the days when business was still conducted on typewriters. I scanned the shelves hoping for one of Colin Cotterill's Dr. Siri mysteries that he had published in special editions for the People's Democratic Republic; I'd seen them in Vientianne in a bookstore that was only marginally more enticing than this one. There were none.

I wasn't surprised. The English language literary scene didn't seem to have appeared on Savannakhet's radar; there wasn't even that traveler's mainstay, the shelf of yellowed, curling, abandoned, multilingual paperbacks, in the hostelry that I was staying in. Although I usually ignored that amenity, at this point I would have tackled a John Grisham masterpiece in Dutch or even Norwegian. But the Savanbanhao Hotel didn't even have maps of Savannakhet in English, which meant not only did I not know where anything was--I had no idea of what there was in this place.

So I walked, for hours, in hot sunlight, down roads that shredded my shoes with the efficiency of razor-blades. Along the river and under the trees were tempting little spots that served grilled chicken and fish and papaya salad at cloth-covered low tables. Hungry, I ordered and looked for a table that didn't have clusters of flies where food had been spilled on the jaunty red tablecloth.

The food was good and the flies enjoyed it. I thanked every god I could think of for the lid on my basket of sticky rice and for the generous portion I'd been given; resolutely I tried to avert my eyes from the plates of chicken and somtam and green vegetables that were no longer mine.

Across from my hotel was a kind woman who sold me a large bottle of cold Beer Laos. I was asleep before six.

The free breakfast offered by my hotel involved one sunny-side up fried egg, a cold baguette, and a cup of milky, sugary instant coffee. "We don't have black coffee," the waitress told me and I fled.

"Chez Boune," the desk clerk replied to my desperate plea for real caffeine, "I will take you there on my motorcycle." And in a small, impeccable cafe, built from Laos timber and open to the dilapidated sidewalk, I was served the most splendid double-espresso in Southeast Asia. "Better than Bangkok," I told the woman who brought it to me, who responded "Better than Starbucks?"

Chez Boune eroded my moral fiber. It was there that I had a dark Beer Laos with my bruschetta well before noon and finished my lunch with a piece of coconut layer cake. And it's the only place in the world where I ate every last morsel of the butter that was served with my baguette the following day--it tasted like summer, sweet and clear and clean on my tongue. "We get it from France," the Laos owner told me, "My husband and I lived in Paris for years."

I walked for miles in Savannakhet, constructing my own mental map of the place, realizing that if I had never been to a colonial Mekong outpost, I would probably have loved this one. But I had, and I didn't. Same old broken pillars behind the walls that obviously once enclosed an estate, same old gaping windows in abandoned French villas with fading mustard-colored walls, same old goats foraging near government offices. A few leafy trees swooped over a road for about a block; the other streets were unshaded and the one large and ugly fountain near a dismal-looking park was bone-dry. Not only did I miss the grace of Kratie in this place--it made me miss Vientianne.

And yet Savannakhet is what I'd wanted. It is Thai. People speak Thai, eat Thai food, happily accept baht for the smallest transaction. They are kind; not even the tuktuk drivers can measure up to the rapaciousness of their counterparts in Vientianne. Their slow pace is soothing and the lack of distractions offered by the town makes it a fine place to catch up on projects that have been ignored or to sit on a verandah and read. Just be damned sure that you bring your own books.

Blowing in the Wind

2011-04-07T19:21:00.000-07:00

The closer to the border I got, the more I realized I wasn't feeling good about going to Cambodia right now. Since I had already jettisoned Saigon because of depleted resources of all kinds, and because Battambang is a place that has always called to me, I did my best to ignore the feeling. Spend the night in Aranyaprathet and cross the border in the morning when your energy's returned, I told myself more than once.

But the truth was, I didn't have the energy. Wiped out and depressed by a long and dismal cold, in no way had this been a trip I was ready to make; I was more than willing to stick to my comfort zone. As the bus moved closer to the end of my journey, it became clear that I didn't want to leave Thailand.

But I had to. There's a quaint custom that almost every expat must adhere to while living in the Kingdom that is dashingly called the visa run. Although this phrase conjures up men in Panama hats and white suits and women with blood-red lipstick and cigarette holders, the reality is far less glamorous. People in wrinkled clothing scurry across the nearest border as cheaply as possible, get a visa renewal within a day or two, and race back to work. As far as I could tell, this was a way for Thailand to put tourist revenue into the pockets of less-favored countries, since despite their best efforts, the visa-runners shell out money after they cross the border for necessities-- transport, food, a hotel room, and beer.

When I have to renew my privilege of living in Thailand, I usually combine the chore with a trip that will make the process fun, and I've always enjoyed these journeys--until now. As I tried to buoy up my spirits for my Cambodian foray, the bus stopped, policeman got on who barked questions at the passengers and a number of people got off. Only two or three returned.

After a half-hour or so, this happened again. The young girl sitting beside me did her best to persuade the policeman to let her remain but he was obdurate. She didn't come back, nor did any of the other passengers.

The third time this happened, soldiers took the place of the police. The young man sitting beside me removed the Buddha image he had on a chain around his neck and slipped it into his pocket just before the bus stopped.

"What's happening?" I asked the woman who sat beside me after my former seat-mate disappeared.

"Khmer people," she explained, "They have no passports, no ID cards."

Suddenly the border tension at Preah Vihear seemed very close and any joy I had tried to muster up over this trip went away. I had no desire to go to Cambodia right now; this wasn't the right time for me and I knew it in the way an animal knows there will be an earthquake. When we reached Aranyaprathet, I asked to be let off at the bus station, where I bought a ticket for Korat. From there, it would be an easy matter to reach the Laos border.

Laos is almost Thailand, I told myself, it's not like really leaving. I can do that. As I stood in the first sunlight I'd felt in weeks, chatting in bad Thai to a friendly, chubby woman who stood nearby, I clutched my bus ticket that would take me through a part of Thailand I had never seen before. Shadows dappled the dust, my sweater was at last too warm, and I felt very happy.

Destination Anywhere

2011-03-30T01:09:00.000-07:00

Nothing feels quite so strange to me as preparing for a trip that I don't want to make. I don't think I've ever felt this way before and I'm not sure why I am now. Ordinarily I'm the sort of person who perks right up at the sight of a new tourist visa, or when making lists of things to take and places to go. None of this is working this time.

Perhaps it's a byproduct of the clouds that have covered Bangkok for much too long, or a lingering trace of my Penang bedbug phobia. Maybe it's apprehension about leaving an extremely imperious cat to his own devices for a week in my apartment. Or maybe it's because I'm finally going to be in Saigon, a city I haven't really avoided, but not one I've yearned to go to either.

The reason I suspect is the cause for my lack of excitement is one I'm reluctant to tell. As banal and boring as it may sound, the trip I really want to be making right now is one that would have me disembarking at SeaTac Airport and heading for the light rail that would take me back to Seattle.

I miss my sons. I'm really not the adventurer I pretend to be, I suppose. The real me is a 62-year-old woman who wants to hug her kids and embroider Home is where the heart is in cross-stitch on a dishtowel.

Tomorrow I'll get on a bus that will take me to one border and then on to another. I will glue myself to the window and stare until my eyes are bloodshot. I'll walk and eat and look and wonder and write things down. I'll get permission to live this life I have now for another stint, if I'm lucky, and during that time I'll think very hard about the second half of this already crazy year.

One Reason Why I Live Here--a Postscript

2011-03-17T22:42:00.000-07:00

The umbrella that fell apart in yesterday's rainstorm never made it home with me. I made a few impotent attempts to make it work properly and then left it in the back of the pickup that I rode home in, fuming.

Anybody who's been patient enough to read this notebook that I keep on this blog knows I'm more often than not annoyed by the pickup trucks that carry people from one end of my neighborhood to another. As I waved one down today to come home after a quick trip for food and the paper, I was amazed to see the driver give me a radiant smile--and my repaired umbrella.

This is Thailand, people, even though that phrase is frequently abbreviated to a perjorative T.I.T. This is the community that has decided to be kind to an elderly farang woman, despite her obvious crotchets, and this is the sort of truly beneficent behavior that makes me melt into a puddle of gratitude.

I love this country and this story is one of the reasons why.

Black Hole Sun

2011-03-17T01:17:00.000-07:00

I bought an umbrella today, which by rights I should never have had to do. This is the season of the inferno in Thailand, and yet the sun has been elusive since mid-February. Warm cloudiness greeted my children when they arrived and prevailed into their departure and beyond. And I've acclimated enough that I like cloudy weather--a good old tropical depression no longer depresses me.

But rain in March is completely wrong. The occasional thunderstorm is always diverting, whenever it shows up--but not drenching rain that bounces back up from the road after it falls, not the kind that bursts out of its swollen clouds just about the time that you've decided to go out and find your dinner. (Three bottles of Minute Maid Pulpy from the convenience cooler of my apartment building doesn't make a meal, but my choices were either Coke, Fanta, or Sprite. Thank heaven Coca-Cola bought Minute Maid for that little jolt of almost-nourishment.)

I live in a Thai building which means the apartments have no kitchen. If I were culinarily inclined, I'd do what local people do in such a building and buy a gas cylinder with a burner attached and make food on that. Or even worse, and more popular in Thailand now, buy a microwave and some frozen meals. The first option terrifies me and the second disgusts me. I moved to one of the world's great food cities so I'd never have to cook again. And the idea never crosses my mind until the season of the deluge hits and food vendors disappear as the rain torrents down upon them. But this is happening about four months earlier than it ought to and I'm not mentally prepared for the "rainy season diet."

For me, this consists of salted nuts and fruit, fresh orange juice and beer--but only if I'm foresighted enough to buy these things early in the day, before it begins to pour. Yes, there are delivery services--even McDonald's will deliver to apartments--and it's possible to have almost any cuisine in the world brought to your door. The Catch-22 is when it rains, traffic comes to a halt and even the delivery motorcycles have trouble negotiating their way through that standstill. And of course, every wuss in Bangkok wants their food brought to them on nights that resemble the forty nights that had inspired Noah to build his ark. Good luck, suckers. I'd rather feast on broken dried noodles from a package of Mama.

Rain in Bangkok rarely is accompanied by chill, but this bout of precipitation has brought a cold snap with it. Laugh if you will, but a 30-degree drop in temperature is cold in any language. I'm wearing a sweater and socks, my windows are closed, and my fans aren't running, which has the cat freaked out because they provide a constant background noise for his life, under normal circumstances.

On one side of the city, there's a weird gleam in the air that would almost be encouraging, except for the bank of menacing clouds that are closing in on the other side. I should feel well-prepared; after all, I bought an umbrella.

It came apart in my hands before it ever made it home--Chinese workmanship at its finest. I know it's an omen of some kind but I'll be damned if I can decide what it means--probably nothing more than "Never buy a umbrella out of season--you'll end up with one that they couldn't sell during those monsoon days that came when they were supposed to."

Gone Baby Gone

2011-03-06T19:45:00.000-08:00

My son and his wonderful girlfriend were here and now they're gone. As always, the hole that is left in my life by their departure is vast and it hurts. Childbirth was nothing in comparison to this.

Here is the curse of early motherhood. You are close enough in age to your children that they sometimes feel like quasi-siblings, which means that during the time that you were intended to explore and experiment, you were a parent. When parenting becomes less of an active job and more of an observatory occupation, you go out to see the world--and with everything you see, you wish your adult children were there to see it all with you.

And then they come and they go--or you visit them and leave--and you hurt more than you ever thought you could. You realize that the loves of your life are your offspring--everyone else was just an amuse-bouche--and you wish more than anything that you could become an on-tap, drop-in-when-you-have-time-kids sort of Mom with cookies fresh from the oven cooling on your kitchen counter and beer in the fridge. (Although that is a nauseating combination, isn't it, come to think of it...)

By the time I'm old enough to stop roaming around and am ready to produce gingersnaps and snickerdoodles again, I'll be too old to be any fun for my sons to be around. (Feel free to edit that sentence--if it weren't mine, I certainly would.) Right now I have learned that I'm happiest when I can see something new with one of my children--I'm lucky. They're explorers too.

I've learned where home is and it is near my children. But there's still so much to see, so many stories to find. That's what seduces me into thinking that there's time to go just a little bit farther before I turn back to be with the people I love most on this whole crazy lovely messed-up planet.

Lilacs and Desire in the Cruelest Month

2011-02-12T23:46:00.000-08:00

It's not even a good line, that old "February is the cruelest month" bilge. In fact he was full of lines that were not even good, that gloomy old fraud--"Do I dare to eat a peach?" But nobody appealed to me the way T.S. Eliot did when I was in my late teens, when I was still a girl and trying things on, studying Camus and Calvin Klein with the same passionate concentration.

I drank coffee by the gallon and smoked almost as much as my father did and abandoned the white gloves that every lady was supposed to wear when she went shopping. I went off to college with my best friend and roommate who shared my belief that there was never any reason to be bored as long as we had functioning imaginations. Shirley made mobiles with our cosmetic and perfume boxes and I scrawled graffiti on our dorm room walls with sidewalk chalk. We shared clothes and after we discovered the joy of speed through diet pills we shared those too. We had our first babies several years later, within months of each other. Our lives diverged and then we lost contact.

I have always, in a deep corner of my heart and mind, missed her.

This month has been weighted. On my windowsill are three flowering jasmine, each in its own little cobalt blue pot, brought to me by a man who no longer lives in Bangkok but whose remembered presence fills my version of this city. One of my sons and his girlfriend will be here in two weeks for a visit that fills me with almost more happiness than I can hold. And the girl I used to be is in some way waking up with a renewed contact with my friend Shirley.

Good things come in threes, it used to be said. It's true that three is a number that holds magic--Macbeth's three witches, the Three Graces, the Trinity. Having these three parts of my life come to me in one month are making me look at the whole of it more closely. Once again, and what does this mean, T.S. Eliot is the one to pinpoint my feelings--We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

About Books

2011-02-07T18:16:00.001-08:00

First of all, this stunning little book was in my mailbox yesterday and I can't wait to take it out for its first walk in my world. I've been eating Bangkok's street food since 1995, but the neighborhoods explored in Bangkok's Top 50 aren't ones I've had meals in very often--and Chinatown is one where the sensory overload is so huge that I simply drop in my tracks when I'm there and eat whatever happens to be closest to me. But not now...thanks to Chawadee Nualkhair (who also reveals her favorite street food spots quite regularly at BangkokGlutton.com) I'm already gluttonously dying for a sequel to this--maybe one that concentrates exclusively on Chinatown???

It's already quite clear to me that Chawadee is a better woman than I--she classifies hoy taud as a snack but I have never been able to manage to follow up a mussel pancake with anything else for at least eight hours. But meal or snack, I'm eager to find the stalls that she recommends for one of my favorite street suppers. And her pages on beverages are wonderful--my quest for nam dok anjan (butterfly pea juice) starts today.

But the best part of Bangkok's Top 50 as far as I'm concerned is it gives the hours that these stalls are open--no longer will I wistfully roam around Soi Convent wondering where the Thai-Muslim chicken biryani (khao moke gai) stall disappeared to. In fact that's where I will be today at noon--they are open for lunch.

This book also gives a brief demystification of a Chinese apothecary, complete with address, a spot on a map, and the name in Thai in case I still can't find it. I am in a state of bliss--thank you, Chawadee! (Further feedback to come...for others who want to have this book, it will soon be in Asia Books and B2S--now available through Amazon and www.bangkokglutton.com)

The American Embassy is presided over by a new ambassador, blonde, smiling, charming. Her Excellency Kristie Anne Kenney has been receiving lots of attention in the English-language papers for breaking out of the usual diplomatic insulation and enjoying her new city. It is undoubtedly no coincidence that for the first time since I first arrived in this city, there is information about the U.S. Embassy's Information Resource Center--Open to the Public with a comfortable reading room with books, magazines, ebooks, CDs, DVDs and, the Bangkok Post reports, a few iPads too. It's on the 9th floor of the GPF Building at 93/1 Wireless Road, open from Monday through Friday 7 am to 4 pm. Who knew??? (When I first arrived here I asked the Embassy about any sort of library that they might have and was told to go to AUA.) Thank you, Your Excellency Ms. Kenney!

At the end of my last visit to Hong Kong, I learned that travelers are allowed to use any of the public libraries in that city if they pay a deposit of 130 HK dollars per book that they wish to borrow. Even the small library I visited in Yau Ma Tei, Kowloon, had a good selection of books in English and the much larger library across the water in Central I was told has a stunning collection that can be borrowed from after paying the deposit. How civilized and how I wish every city would adopt this policy.

Happy Reading to all--

"One word for you, my boy--"

2011-01-29T18:34:00.000-08:00

It's been a long time since The Graduate and if Benjamin Braddock had listened to the sage gentleman at poolside, he'd be a wealthy man today.

Am I the only one who remembers the thrill of having Baggies replace waxed paper? The smell of baloney no longer wafted from my brown-bag lunch and nevermore did I suffer the humiliation of finding that my sandwich had escaped the confines of its wrapping and was in discrete and inedible pieces within the bag. Baggies were clean, modern and required no arcane origami skills--what was there not to love?

Almost half a century later, there's plenty not to love about plastic bags, no matter what size they come in. And I live in a country that is choking in them--http://thefastertimes.com/foodculture/2010/04/01/plastic-attack/

When I first came to Thailand, I went out one morning, asked a vendor at a coffee cart for a cup of hot, black coffee, and was handed a small plastic bag, held tightly shut by a rubber band, and a straw issuing from the rubber band closure. It was filled with hot, black coffee. I was terrified.

But the bag held and I eventually emptied it and threw the receptacle away. It was the first of hundreds of thousands of small sandwich bags that came my way and went into the garbage--as Karen Coates says in the post that is linked above, a meal from a Thai market can easily involve a dozen plastic bags. If it's a group dinner, there might be a hundred.

Just buying a simple meal of grilled chicken and sticky rice involves a bag for the chicken, a bag for the rice, and a bag for the spicy sauce that is the artform that transforms this food. Braised pork leg is even worse--a styrofoam box for the pork, greens and rice, a plastic bag for the broth, a plastic bag for the seasoning sauce, and still another if you add the raw chili and garlic cloves that are eaten with this meal. This is the reason why I rarely bring food home--if I eat it on a plate, no bags are involved.

Penang and Hong Kong, both islands with limited space, are launching a war against plastic. In Hong Kong, if you don't bring your own bag to a store, you pay for a plastic one. In Penang, this is the case for part of the week and there was a strong rumor that it would be an everyday occurrence after the first of the year. Supermarkets sell fabric bags and some of them made it back to Bangkok with me.

I use them when I go to 7/11 or a supermarket or a bookstore. When I go to the markets that I love, I still use it but it's a vessel for plastic bags--one for the oranges, one for the bananas. Fruit vendors weigh the fruit in a plastic bag before figuring the price and even if I dumped the fruit in my cloth bag, the plastic would still be discarded--I don't have a solution for that yet.

Things are changing here--supermarkets have signs that ask customers to bring their own bag. Plastic cups with dome-shaped lids have almost supplanted the bag and rubber band combo. I'm not sure that's an improvement, but Thailand still has "gleaners". People rummage through garbage looking for items that can be sold to recyclers, and factories are turning out items made from recycled plastic. It's an imperfect solution but it's a step away from a plastic-clogged world.

Catching Up

2011-01-22T23:39:00.000-08:00

I realize I'm getting old when I return from a long trip, never when I'm on one. It's when I return to Bangkok that I fall into the lassitude I refuse to succumb to when I'm exploring a city that I don't know. In the same way that a bad break-up is supposed to take a month for every year that you were immersed in the relationship--or is the reverse true?-- it takes me a week for every month I've been away to bounce back into my life as I once knew it.

Part of this is a sort of mental digestion process. I take photos and keep a wretched set of notes when I travel but mostly I wander around in silence and look and observe and feel as hard as I can. I try to encode what I experience in my cells, release it all when I begin to remember, and then select what's useful to me as a writer. This process all takes longer than it sounds and makes me a hell of a dull traveling companion--a lot like a python in human form--as well as someone who needs lots of silence and solitude when I get home.

Another factor in my slow reassimilation process is Bangkok does not stand still when I'm gone--and an absence of three months guarantees I'm going to find a lot of changes when I return. People leave, buildings dissolve, foodstalls disappear, new houses emerge like frogs after a rainstorm--and that's just in my neighborhood. It's what makes this city an exciting and vibrant and frequently unsettling place to live--and for me, a woman who thinks of routine in the same way that the devil regards holy water, it's what makes it a place I always am glad to come back to.

A few days ago, I went out into a street that has always bored me senseless and found a one-storey deep purple building with no windows and stylized, twisted trees embellishing its metal exterior, sprawled along the sidewalk. It looked like the sort of rock and roll club where hair metal used to flourish in this city a decade or so before.

I walked in to a cavern, a space that was dark and surprisingly, in this land of perpetually frigid air-conditioning, not cool. Little shops dotted the center like mushrooms on a tree trunk, selling the sort of thing that upscale teenage girls love: ballet slippers, short and skimpy dresses, costume jewelry, slouchy handbags in primary colors, ice cream. Taking up almost as much space as the shops were tables and chairs scattered about, festooned with stylized spiderwebs and overturned wine goblets, as though wedding guests had suddenly realized that Miss Havisham wasn’t going to be married after all.

Small enclosed restaurants of the bistro variety lined the inner perimeter of the building and running the full length of the back wall was a Goreyesque exterior of a Victorian mansion, complete with baroque and mythical history on a bilingual sign. For around six dollars, mall visitors were invited to enter and be terrified. “Do not harm the actors in any way,” the sign cautioned, making me feel terrified without even paying an entrance fee.

Walking back towards my apartment, I began to notice all of the brand new apartment and condos that are so lavishly advertised on walls of the Skytrain and Metro, and suddenly there was a market that filled the edges of boring old Ratchadapisek Road with food and clothes and the newspapers in English that have disappeared from my soi. Trees sprouted in dusty optimism at the sides of the street and to my surprise I realized this thoroughfare had been filling in the blanks during the two years that I had ignored it. Bangkok’s irrepressible life and spirit is taking hold, moving from the sois nearby where it has always been to a larger staging ground. In this most unlikely neighborhood, one that had never held interest for me, Bangkok's surprises welcomed me home one more time.

One Foot at a Time

2011-01-22T19:30:00.001-08:00

Lantau is Hong Kong's largest island and houses the airport, Disneyland, and more than a few shopping malls. The ferry that took me there on the early morning of New Year's Day embarked at a pier that looked quite a bit like a beach community in southern California, complete with lattes. But my friend Jennifer had promised me a hike with light and silence, so I suspended my disbelief and followed in her wake.

In a surprisingly short time we were on a coastline that was filled with fishermen's cottages and small well-tended vegetable gardens. This, Jennifer explained, was where the Filipina maids who worked for island families lived, and as we passed open doorways, we saw young women cooking, chatting, primping, as cd players blared music onto an ocean view. I thought of the Hong Kong Filipinas who take to the streets in search of their own space on Sundays and holidays, giving each other manicures while sitting on cardboard-covered pavement and began to understand the advantages of island living.

As we left the houses behind, Jennifer stopped still and whispered, "Listen." An echoing whisper was the only sound as waves washed onto rocks and then whooshed away.

A road led us past a Trappist monastery and then into a forest dappled with light. A narrow path took us along the edge of a towering hill and the cool, clean, sharp odor of berries and dew-moistened leaves hit my nostrils like a drug. The whisper of waves had been replaced by a soft rush of wind moving the surrounding trees and for a minute I greedily longed to stand in this place during a storm.

A steep staircase with concrete steps and a well-anchored railing led straight down the hillside to the water, a small town that had once been a silver-mining community, and ferries and buses back to the city. A Turkish restaurant there was the spot where Jennifer took me for lunch and I tore into the fresh bread that was brought to our table with the sort of appetite that only comes after lungs tarnished with urban grime have been thoroughly bathed in fresh air.

Chungking Year's End

2011-01-21T18:16:00.000-08:00

I took sushi up to the Holiday early on New Year’s Eve, enough to share and be festive. It became a potluck picnic, with bite-size pieces of Hari’s supermarket pizza, and chunks of guava and oranges. A Polish sushi restaurant owner emerged from his room to evaluate and identify what I had bought, then went off into the night early with his bottle of champagne, goblets and a pretty girl, all brought with him from his native land. “You should leave now if you want to see the fireworks at the waterfront,” he warned me, but it was only eight o’clock.

I’d seen fireworks before. What interested me more than pyrotechnics was how CKM and its neighborhood celebrated the turning of the year. “More people than on Christmas Eve,” Hari told me, “because on Christmas the Muslims don’t come out but for the New Year there is everybody on the street.”

I was the only one from our little impromptu feast who was curious about what was going on outside of our walls. “Too many people,’ my companions shuddered and turned to their computers to be with friends in other countries.

Lines of young Chinese dressed in party clothes waited at the elevators and the halls of CKM were already almost empty at nine p.m. The streets outside were possessed by pedestrians once more but the shops were all open. It was business as usual in lower Kowloon but with an extravaganza of customers.

Christmas Eve had been a moment when all real life was suspended in favor of magic, with people out to see the lights and decorations in a long and delighted parade. What filled the area now was an ocean of shoppers participating in what looked like the world’s hugest midnight madness sale.

“It’s too early,” I said when I returned to the Holiday. “There are two things to do out there, shop or go to a bar and drink and I’m not in the mood to do either one.” But an hour later, I put on my coat and my ugly, newly purchased market gloves and went out in the world once more.

The street to the waterfront felt as though it was full of one massive, pushing, crawling organism, rather than a crowd of people. It was packed solid with bodies that moved a sixteenth of an inch at a time and it seemed obvious that even if we reached the waterfront, all we would be able to see would be backs and heads. There was a grim quality about the collective determination that surrounded me that made me think of how little I wanted to be trampled to death.

Before claustrophobia could gain the upper hand, I made my way to the sidewalk, which was almost empty in comparison to the maelstrom of people I had just left. Other cowards had placed themselves next to buildings and a group of Sikhs were quite industriously applying themselves to bottles of Chivas Regal, with a remarkable lack of celebratory spirit, almost as though they were getting ready to go to work.

They moved off toward CKM and then suddenly I heard drumming. By the time I reached the spot where the sound came from, it had taken on an insistent and wild rhythm and I wasn’t surprised to find the men who surrounded it were the scotch-drinking Sikhs.

It was a double-sided drum, hung around a neck by a strap, which must have been irksome because the drum wasn’t small. Men took turns playing, passing it around, dancing with abandon that Zorba the Greek would have envied, some still holding bottles of Scotch.

They were all men, until a short, plump Western woman who was far from glamorous broke into their circle and joined them. The dancing became wilder in response and downright lewd as one man stood beside her with energetic pelvic thrusts. I couldn’t see her face to gauge her response; the circle of dancers grew so tight that I was afraid she’d be trampled but she emerged in one piece, with an incredible New Year’s Eve story for the folks back home.

The crowd around the dancers was now so thick that I could only see hands moving to the drumbeat over the heads and upheld cameras of people around me. The drumming was loud and compelling and when the distant boom of fireworks began to echo through the buildings around us, none of us turned to see, although the glass walls of hotels and shopping malls took on an eerie, apocalyptic glow.

And then all of us were swept up in a push that began to carry us down the street toward the subway station entrances. I broke free from the surge and managed to get to the steps of CKM, where a group of young African women smiled and made room for me. In the street was a mass of moving darkness, pressed so closely together that it looked like a carpet of heads. And in the middle of it all, moving steadily away, was the sound of drums, swimming down a river that only comes to life to mark the passage of time.

As I went back to my room, I knew somewhere the party continued but I was too old to care. “I came back at five this morning,” Jun told me on the first day of the year and I knew I had missed the real story but it was no longer mine to tell.

New Territory, New Year

2010-12-30T18:49:00.000-08:00

Hong Kong is the most compressed big city I've ever seen, filled with layer upon layer of buildings and a spiderweb of crazily intersecting streets. Kowloon has more space, which I love, but both places are crammed with more opportunities for conspicuous consumption than I feel comfortable with over the long haul. My antidote for this has been street markets that sell fresh food and utilitarian clothing to local residents, until the day I got on a bus near one of those markets, that took me into the hills and beyond.

The area beyond Kowloon stretches into mainland China and is still called the New Territories. Satellite communities to house the overflow from the cities are sprouting up here, in the middle of dazzling natural beauty that still gives the impression of wilderness. There are hills behind the highrises that are dramatically shaped and gloriously green. There are islands within spitting distance of small coastal towns that are vacant--some of which are just slightly bigger than a postage stamp. And in front of the Hong Kong Heritage Museum on the banks of a sparkling river, there are trees full of white egrets, watching the nearby fisherman reel rather unimpressive catches up onto a bridge.

In Sha Tin park near the river, old ladies ballroom danced to outdoor karaoke while old men watched from a vantage point on the hill above the dancers. Suddenly I was in Beijing again, until I found a foodcourt on a busy street where all of the food was Japanese. In Sai Kung I scrambled onto a bobbing sampan from a steep staircase with the help of people I'd never met before and was carried to a silent island with rocky beaches that took me back to my Alaskan childhood. I needed this kind of time.

This beauty is a quick ride on the MRT or in the case of Sai Kung, an MRT ride and then a spectacular bus trip that winds across the hills. The journey is so brief that it's hard to believe it transports me to another universe, where a child's lost festively pink balloon floats along a grass-green river as egrets watch it speculatively, or to a pier that will take me to an island that I can almost believe once sheltered Robinson Crusoe.

I've learned in the past few months that places like this and I aren't meant for longterm relationships but are quick restorative flings to sustain me when I go back to my crazy crowded kinetic city that I love and leave and always return to. They stay with me as small places of quiet and beauty, to be remembered when I most need them, gifts of light and silence.

From Shanghai Street Art Space

2010-12-25T02:27:00.001-08:00

Christmas Was Really Here

2010-12-25T00:56:00.000-08:00

Starbucks was open this morning in the only spot in the world where I enjoy going to Starbucks--Isquare across from Chungking Mansions--and the very nice older couple who sat near me spoke Thai, so I was able to misuse the language I love for a little while. There were mangos and pomelo from Thailand in the supermarket so I took them back to the Holiday for a taste of Bangkok along with a little bottle of Bailey's for a taste of Christmas. Two of the people who tasted with me were from Chiang Mai but originally from NYC and Seattle--and since they had been to Nepal, which is where Hari and Jun come from, there were no degrees of separation on Christmas morning.

I went off to find a religious observance of the birthday, since I knew there was often spirited hymn-singing accompanied by drums on the fourth floor. But the Christian Center was closed for Christmas, which I thought was rather delightful, so I went to the Turkish kebab place instead, where the second course of my holiday brunch was mint goat's milk ice cream and Turkish coffee, both of which are definitely drugs and definitely delicious.

Riding my sugar/caffeine high, I left CKM and went off in search of a baby tuxedo at H&M, where I discovered a cast of thousands all shopping the sale racks at the only H&M in Hong Kong that carries no baby clothes. So the infant girl whom I just met will probably not sport the Annie Hall look this season, latida, latida.

Shanghai Street is my favorite Kowloon thoroughfare so I escaped the aerobic shopping of the malls near Nathan Road and headed down past cooking supply shops that have really lovely wooden molds for I don't know what and gorgeous little wooden spoons and mesh things with handles that would look really pretty hanging on a wall.

I was stopped in my tracks by a sign hanging on the door of the Shanghai Street Artspace that said essentially Kids, don't bring your peanuts in here anymore. We've had to sweep up shells everywhere. This isn't something I've ever seen posted on a door of an art gallery, so I had to go in, saying as I entered, "I didn't bring any peanuts with me."

A young man came over and began to tell me why the sign was there--the space is to encourage neighborhood children to come in and make art, which they do but the peanut shells they left behind were becoming a nuisance. The space had once been an art gallery, but is now a place that encourages creativity--and as it turned out, much more.

Flowers made of bright, iridescent paper that are attached to bamboo frames covered the upper wall. These once covered the walls of businesses in Kowloon in geometric and intricate traditional patterns, handmade by artists, when the enterprise first opened and would remain in place for a year. A black and white photo of a building on Shanghai Street shows what this looked like, much like the ceramic flowers on a Thai temple, with the walls covered with designs made of handmade flowers, which must have been dazzling.

The art space has an artist in residence, a man who spent his life making art on buildings with these designs. When the young men who run the space found out the artist no longer had work, they asked him to be with them. He creates his designs and teaches children who want to learn how to do what he does.

But that's not all that goes on here. The director of this amazing community resource is an activist and uses art to make his points. Today is the one-year anniversary of the imprisonment of this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner and the windows of the art space are emblazoned with the face of Liu Xiaobao wearing a Santa Claus hat and a smile. His face is also attached to an empty stool that stands on the sidewalk near the open door.

Yau Ma Tei is not a wealthy area and gentrification is not yet its hallmark. The Shanghai Street Art Space is near the Kowloon Asthma Center and the neighborhood Immigration Office. The Yau Ma Tei Public Library is close by, and it looks as though it still exists in the 1950s. A large fresh market fills an area only blocks away and it is for the community, not for tourists. It's a neighborhood that needs the creativity and energy of the people who run this space--and Hong Kong needs their irreverence and imagination and freedom of thought. Please stop in and chat with Lee Chun Fung at 404 Shanghai Street. He's a man who can make December 25th feel like Christmas.

Chungking Christmas Eve

2010-12-24T07:23:00.000-08:00

Before I went to dinner tonight, Hari told me, "Tonight the streets will be full of people. There will be no cars, only walk, walk, walk." There were "No loitering" signs in the subway that hadn't been there earlier in the day and notices said, "After 6 pm waiting for friends in this area will not be allowed."

When I came home at 9 pm, I came up to a neighborhood that was engulfed with pedestrians. A river of people coursed down Nathan Road and along the waterfront, admiring the Christmas lights, taking pictures, shopping. There were families with their children dressed in festive red outfits, teenagers dressed to the teeth, people wearing Santa Claus hats and reindeer horns and cardboard top hats with glitter script that said Merry Christmas. There were Indians and Africans and Westerners and Chinese, all torrenting along streets that usually belong to vehicles, all punctiliously following police crowd control instructions, all having fun. Carolers stood in the middle of the road and a brass band swept by, playing a jazzy version of Hark the Herald.

"This happens three times a year," a security guard told me, "On Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve, and Chinese New Year." He and his colleagues were pulling gates over the entrance to Chungking Mansions at 11 pm, leaving one small open doorway that was just big enough to allow one person to enter the building at a time. The halls were almost empty and most of the lights were already turned out.

Families were headed toward the subways, a pop concert was in full swing on Canton Road, and the holiday spirit showed no signs of ending. "After midnight there is singing and dancing," Hari told me, but sensory overload claimed me well before then. Merry Christmas, everyone.

Kowloon Christmas

2010-12-23T22:56:00.000-08:00

It's sweater weather in Kowloon on Christmas Eve, with a crisp breeze giving an autumnal touch to midwinter. There are hordes of shoppers in the subway and on the streets but there always are shoppers in this community. People in clothing that is far from haute couture wait in roped-off lines to get into Chanel and Louis Vuitton, gleefully taking photos of each other as they stand under the designer logo. Crowds mill along a sidestreet filled with fake watches and Birkin bags and in the downmarket Yau Ma Tei area, women scrutinize stalls crammed with polyester clothing and infant garments that look highly flammable. Even Chungking Mansions has put out bins of gilted keyrings with Hong Kong scenes and little plastic trees and gaudy Christmas balls. Tis the season after all.

Westerners decry holiday commercialism in their home countries but I do think Hong Kong has a deathgrip on that particular talent. Why just commercialize a holiday when you can strike directly at the heart of it--the Christmas tree?

A prominent public square in the heart of Hong Kong has a mammoth Christmas tree that is purportedly made of Swarovski crystals--at least that's what all of the nearby signage proclaims. And in my own temporary neighborhood of Nathan Road, Christmas has been brought to us by Chula Pops, with a tree decorated with gigantic versions of these confections, which "make Christmas sweet." There are probably far more co-opted trees all over the city, but I don't have the energy to hunt them down.

Yesterday a friend and I went to Lantau Island's Big Buddha, a statue so glorious that it transcends all of the hype that surrounds it. A "village" dedicated to shopping and Starbucks was what we walked through before climbing the 200+ stairs to reach the Buddha, and suddenly we were surrounded by snowflakes. As Johnny Mathis crooned over a "white Christmas," a snow machine blew bits of dandruff onto passersby. Before I could indulge in my usual cheap cynicism, I caught sight of the very small children who were transfixed by what was coming from the sky and suddenly the snowfall was real and the carols were sweet and Christmas was really and truly in the air.

Merry Christmas to all--even (or perhaps especially) to those who manufacture a phony snowfall and make little children happy.

Goat's Milk Ice Cream and Politics: Chungking Morning

2010-12-10T20:08:00.000-08:00

This morning I had almond goat’s milk ice cream for breakfast, found in a Turkish kebab place in Chungking Mansions. The guy who sold it to me said rather mournfully. “America is not safe. They go to other countries because they say they want to make those places safe but America’s people are not safe in their own country.” It was a heavy dose of reality to swallow first thing in the morning but I agreed with him, having lived in my country as a woman alone, struggling not to live in fear, but always cautious.

DVDs and perfume are an unlikely combination for a retail space but that’s what one shop in CKM has for sale. Another counter sold cotton candy machines and chocolate fountains, with photos of a middle-aged blonde happily presiding over free-flow chocolate from a fountain presumably purchased from this spot. An Indian grocery sells fruit and vegetables from cartons on the floor outside the shop, which don’t look as fresh as they probably were a week ago. A little boy rested one foot on top of a pile of potatoes as his father chatted at length with the shopkeeper; fortunately they’ll be cooked at high heat or peeled before someone eats them.

Clothing designed for infant ballerinas, all pink and tulle, wait to identify babies as undeniably female with a shrine to Bob Marley and Tupac, their faces emblazoned on tank tops and tee shirts, next door. African fabric is everywhere, in prints that are visual celebrations--if not orgies-- sold in bolts that would upholster an entire living room set.

I have found one Chinese food stall and one Chinese souvenir counter in Chungking Mansions—and no Christmas trees or canned carols. For the lack of Christmas commercialism alone, I would love this place.

Yesterday a jackhammer tore through the air and through the old tiles outside the apartment across from the Holiday Guest House. This morning the new tile lay clean and glistening and firmly in place, while a worker waited for the elevator with chunks of the old floor. Project completed, peace restored and I not for the first time have respect for a country without OSHA. Without regulation, people have jobs and the jobs get done. Fast. It’s no accident that it was Chinese men who made it possible for the US to have a railroad.

There is a community in this five-building monolith. “You were here before, this is your second time,” a man at a Pakistani foodstall remarked last night. And yes I had, once in April, and was astounded that he remembered. Chungking Mansions is no place to behave badly; memories are long and time holds no statute of limitations. I wander about this small town, watching and eating and looking, realizing that now on my third visit, I am no longer a stranger.

666 Words about Penang

2010-12-05T18:51:00.000-08:00

666 Words About Penang

And of course there is sunlight today, not profuse and glorious but more than I’ve seen in a week. I have to remember that if the Brits settled somewhere in SE Asia it was because it tended to be cloudy. I wonder why they never made it to Hanoi; they probably avoided it because it lies inland, gravitating toward the small and misty islands with bad climates instead. The woman who wrote Morning is the Whole Day pointed out the similarities between England and Malaysia. I should have remembered.

Jessie said yesterday that she had been horrified at the change between the woman she first met and the one who had spent two months in music hell. “Your face was so different from when you came,” she said. Ah yes, and I rarely burst into tears in a public place either, as complete strangers walk past.

I’ve read in novels and memoirs how people—usually women-- weather times of crisis without wavering and then become masses of quivering nerves when all is well again, Post-traumatic stress disorder is the term our time and place reduces that to, an envelope of clinical words for the near-panic state that comes from having what is accepted and demanded as normalcy being shot directly to hell. The Vietcong reputedly sent blasting music for hours into the jungle nights as torture for nearby American troops and I can testify that it is extremely effective. I would rather endure 24 hours of something truly horrible and then have it over and done with than ¼ of my waking moments consumed with sound that I can’t abide, when I’m winding down for sleep, for weeks and weeks and weeks.

Lack of sleep plays hell not only with emotions and sanity but appetite too. I know the food here is good; I loved it when I first arrived but now I associate tamarind and shrimp paste and even the lovely fresh orange juice with throbbing amplifiers and bellowing singers and my stomach closes shut.

When the music was going on every night, I found ways to keep from screaming but once it ended I was shocked when I discovered that I couldn’t sink into silence at night. Somewhere inside I waited for the noise to begin, even though it was after the legally bound time of silence, after midnight.

“It will start again,” Jessie said, “You never know when. It depends on the deity.” And another woman told me, “It’s much worse in August, and it goes on longer.”

I know that if I stayed here, the minute I saw a blue plastic structure go up indicating that stage-building is in progress, inwardly I would start to scream and wouldn’t be able to stop.

This is done to benefit Chinese temples. The music doesn’t burst into full glory until after the final call to prayer fades into the night, at around 8 pm. Since the concerts have ended, that last call to prayer has become longer, louder, and more pronounced. It makes me wonder what the Moslem population thinks about the deity concerts and if they ever attend them? I didn’t see a bescarved head among the concert-goers the night of my investigation. Unless it comes up in fiction, or I ask Jessie, I will never know.

I look at the decaying houses that I had dreamed of living in. They stand waiting for renovation or destruction in the part of Georgetown near the historic area and now I know that within their grace and silence lives vermin. I’ve seen rats swimming down the open drains and I have learned in this city exactly what a thriving bed bug colony looks like. Even here in the modern splendor of Symphony Park, I received a spider bite that took over a week to heal. I’m only grateful that I escaped the experience of lice—but then of course I do face another 36 hours or so in Georgetown...

Noise, clouds and vermin. Hello/goodbye, Penang.

Early Resolutions

2010-12-05T03:26:00.000-08:00

Hong Kong is easy. I have stories to find, work to do, people to visit, and miles of sidewalks to walk. With fewer than thirty days in that city and with still so much of it unexplored, I simply plan to succumb to its rush and energy, absorbing as much as I can.

I’ll return to Bangkok at the perfect time, after Christmas and New Year’s with their emotional weight and well before Chinese New Year, which I love with an ignorant passion. It’s still cool there in January and the light has a winter cast to it, but there will be sun. After two months of Penang’s clouds, I’m hungry for Bangkok’s sunlight.

I will have avoided the knots of Christians who sing carols on the Skytrain and the frantic commercial frenzy of lights and Christmas trees that glitter in the shopping malls. I won’t be there for Starbucks’ marketing of eggnog lattes or hotels serving up hearty winter meals in a city that has never known a winter.

When I get back, even the holiday hangovers will be old news and Bangkok will be getting ready for the return of blinding, blazing heat and a spurt of holidays that have nothing to do with the Western calendar. The exception of course is Valentine’s Day where the streets are full of stalls selling little pink garments for miniscule Thai girls and hordes of flower vendors take to the open road.

I need to find my new home, but after the domestic disaster that I blundered into in Malaysia, I’m going to look for my Bangkok spot with all deliberate speed. I’ll find a place where I can work and then I’ll reclaim my life in Thailand.

I did that rather badly over the past two years. I tried to step back into the past and let the present annoy me far more than I should ever have allowed. I took a place I loved for granted and then wondered where its charm had gone. I whined a lot. I was a true pain in the ass.

In the past two months I’ve become acutely aware of what I walked away from. When I go back, the things I will be grateful for will far outweigh the things that are less attractive to me. I won’t list them here; I won’t fail to write about them as I re-experience them; I won’t forget how it has been to live without them.

Homeward Bound

2010-12-01T20:32:00.000-08:00

Last summer I returned to my home in Bangkok to find few traces of the unrest that had turned the downtown core to a battleground and no hints of any sort of reconciliation between the government and the Red Shirts. The burned shopping centers were already being rebuilt. If I hadn’t read the news articles about the battle that had consumed the end of April and much of May, I would never know that my city had been full of smoke and gunfire a week or so before I returned after a three-month absence.

There were ripples on the domestic front. Tensions that had to have been exacerbated by the political debacle had come to a flashpoint between my housemates and the woman who had been our housekeeper for fifteen years. She packed up her meager belongings and left in tears.

The man who sold coffee on the main street of our neighborhood now brought his baby son to work with him every day. One of my favorite restaurants had been closed for a month because of the street fighting outside its walls and now was almost empty every time I went to it.

Adrenaline surges during times of crisis and ebbs away after, leaving exhaustion behind. What I returned to was a post-adrenaline Bangkok, and since I had never seen it in an exhausted state before, this was more disturbing than the burned-out buildings.

I left it. I was certain I could make a home in another Southeast Asian city, and in Penang I found what I was sure I needed. I was mistaken.

Since 1995 I have lived off and on in Bangkok. I was never completely sure of why it continued to pull me back. Now I know.

It’s the people who bring their energy and creativity to that place from all over the Kingdom of Thailand. They make this a kinetic city, constantly moving and changing and redefining and adopting and absorbing. Bangkok is a city that is never going to be completed and that makes for some rather stunning dissonance within its continually expanding borders. But it has, as my friend Elizabeth observed recently, “great infrastructure.”

And I agree, although the infrastructure I salute isn’t the Skytrain or the Underground or the new train to the airport. It’s the stall only feet away from a shopping center on Sukhumvit that sets up tables every night to serve one dish only—the best chicken rice I’ve had anywhere in Asia. (Yes, Penang roasts the chicken they use for this dish—which is terrific—but the sauces from stall to stall all taste the same, and that’s where the excellence of this meal resides.)

It’s the network of trucks and motorcycles and riverboats that will get you where you want to go, anywhere in the city, far beyond the newer forms of mass transit. It’s the man from Chiang Rai in my neighborhood who makes fabulous food from the north of the country and the thousands of women who have made papaya salad and grilled chicken Thailand’s national dish. It’s the exquisite manners that children are taught from the day they can bring their chubby little hands together in a wai. It’s the markets that sell fresh food still, all over the city, even though supermarkets are everywhere nearby. It’s the shining, glossy, clean hair and the well-scrubbed bodies of people who live in one of the most polluted cities of the world but who never smell bad themselves. It’s the temples, still supported as social centers, providing education and shelter for people who might not otherwise be able to afford these things.

Yes, it’s the bookstores that draw me back as well and the eccentric and original expats I’ve met who have lived in this place far longer than I. And the lovely, nondurable shoes for sale on almost every corner, and jasmine garlands and fruit stalls and beautiful blazing sunsets. But these things exist because of Thai people and the way they have chosen to shape their capital city.

I will have days and even weeks when I complain about the trendiness of my home in the world—Krispy Kreme anyone?—and the insanity of its politics. But those things aren’t the core of Bangkok—that’s the coffee-slurping that causes every long-term relationship to quaver and scream. I will take off when I need to, for the rest of my life, but Bangkok is where I choose to be and will choose to be, over and over, because of the people who live there and how they live their lives.

Thank You Note to Georgetown--It's Been Fun!

2010-12-01T04:10:00.000-08:00

For the past two months I’ve lived in a very lovely little city. I’ve posted photos and tried to write lyrically about Georgetown. God knows it deserves all the adjectives I could possibly bring to bear upon it.

I’ve met some unbelievably kind people, all of whom speak my native tongue, and have found several gorgeous little spots to relax in. Here are my favorites.

On the backpacker oasis of Chulia Street is a hotel that up until recently was one of the disheveled examples of decaying grandeur for the frugal traveler. It has been renovated to financial heights far above my own fiscal capabilities but I found that its breakfast buffet is like a tutorial in Penang’s culinary history. The Yeng Keng Hotel was built in the mid-1800s as an Anglo-Indian bungalow and became a budget hotel in the 1900s. Now 5 million ringgit and over a century later, it is a stunning place to sit and ease into the day. Manager Jacky Cheung takes great pains to bring in the best of the BabaNonya delicacies that travelers might otherwise never taste, and the coffee he has chosen is almost the best I’ve had in Penang.

It would indubitably be the best if the guy at Fatty Loh’s Chicken Rice on Nagore Street hadn’t told me about siTigun Café, where Indonesian Tigun Wibisana retired from backstage work on Broadway to roast coffee beans in Georgetown. (Tigun is beyond a doubt still a New Yorker—he knows his smoked salmon and you should not pass it up when you’re there—comes with a very good croissant and just the right amount of cream cheese on the side.) Sinking into the faded comfort of an aged sofa, surrounded by Broadway posters and listening to jazz, I go there every week religiously. I buy beans to take home and have lunch and sit in one of the prettiest spots I’ve found in Penang

It would be the prettiest if a debonair little dog hadn’t lured me through the door of the place she is in charge of—Amelie Café on Armenian Street. It is incredible how much beautiful stuff has been artfully arranged in a dark and delightful little room that is certainly bigger than a breadbox—but not by much. The owners are clearly artists and are fabulous conversationalists and also make the best lassi in the city. It’s almost my favorite drink on the island of Penang—with absolutely no sugar involved.

It would be my favorite if I hadn’t ended up one day at the Jolly Café on Masjid Kapitan Keling or Pitt Street. I went in because of the name and because it is open-air on two sides with a great view of sidewalk strollers. I go back as often as possible because of the nutmeg juice, made from fresh nutmeg fruit and more aromatic than sweet. No other place has measured up to that standard of nutmeg juice for me, and although the Jolly Café isn’t as pretty as my other refuges—oh hell it is not pretty at all—it’s been another once a week staple in my Georgetown incarnation.

As has been the Trois Canon Café on Chulia Street, because the lady behind the counter is one of the kindest people I have met in my wanderings through this city and because it is one of the few diners in a classical mode that I’ve found in SE Asia, and because the hot buttered toast with kaya (coconut jam) is superlative comfort food. And who doesn’t need comfort once in a while? Even in Georgetown…

Exiles in the Mansion

2010-11-28T22:43:00.000-08:00

When I returned to my room in Chungking Mansions on my first afternoon there, I walked into a smell that was a lot like soggy bread and when I sat on my bed, the blanket felt damp. At first I thought that when Hari or Jun cleaned my bathroom, which was only inches from where I slept, perhaps they’d inadvertently sprayed the outer room with water. Then I realized that in my zipped suitcase, out of cleaning range, my clothes were damp too.

I opened my window but the air that came in from the enclosed space between buildings smelled like garbage and mildew. No wonder, I realized. Earlier in the day I’d used my camera’s puny little zoom feature to augment my myopic view of the airconditioner in a window across from me. The white objects that covered it in a small mound were bags and boxes and less identifiable debris and outside my window were pigeons cleaning up food that someone had dumped from above me.

The imposing glass and steel building across from me on Nathan Road smelled unmistakably of wet mops when I had gone there for coffee that morning and on the streets the air was still. Throwing open the window I had pleaded to have was an act of simple-minded optimism, the instinctive act of someone who lived in a Bangkok neighborhood filled with the scent of jasmine and fried chili.

Thailand had turned me into a woman who lived through her senses. Deprived of all but the most rudimentary language skills in that country, I depended on sight and smell to interpret the world around me. In Kowloon, my view was of diseased concrete and trash-covered air conditioners and what I smelled made me feel as though I were living at the bottom of a deep and polluted river. I thought of the trees covered with small and fragrant blossoms on my Bangkok street and struggled to keep from whimpering.

I was going to spend a month in Chungking Mansions and although I didn’t mind living in a room that was perhaps the world’s cleanest shower stall, there were changes I needed to make. Fortunately it was a very small room; it wouldn’t take the efforts of a Martha Stewart to transform it.

In Bangkok my bedroom was a scented orchard every morning, thanks to Boots, the British shop that sold lime and coconut and orange fragrance in the form of soap and shampoo and lotion. Although Hong Kong had been shaped by Great Britain, Boots wasn’t one of the blessings of colonialism and the local version, Watson’s, wasn’t the same olfactory paradise when it came to bathing. But, I remembered, with a burst of relief, there was at least one branch of Lush—I’d smelled it when I left the Hong Kong subway station on my way home hours before.

Lush is so cute that I usually avoid it with enthusiasm. Its salesgirls would head toward me in charming little clouds if I even seemed to inhale when walking past one of their Seattle shops and it merchandises soap as though it’s food, which nauseates me. But when it came down to living with the odor of wet bread or watching adorable little girls slice bars of soap as though they were serving cheese at a cocktail party, my choice was obvious.

I wince every time that I think of how much money I spent on aromatherapy that afternoon but it was worth it. Lemongrass, jasmine, lime blossoms pervaded my little portion of Chungking Mansions every morning and lingered through the rest of the day.

I handed over the bedding from my narrow little cot and replaced it with the muted earthy colors of vanilla and dark green, punctuated with a bright magenta cushion, and lined my tiny windowsill with a pot of azalea and one of jasmine that I found at the flower market on the edge of my new neighborhood.

“You’ve made a little home,” Hari said when he came to take away the unwanted bedlinen. His smile didn’t reach his eyes, and both of us for a second were caught in the memory of other places we had loved.

He had told me once about fishing in Nepali mountain streams and as he spoke, it was the only time I saw the sadness leave his eyes. I felt my own heart brighten as I remembered the sound of water flowing over rocks in an Alaskan valley and for a second felt a wave of nostalgia for the world I once lived in.

A few days later I found a magazine with photographs of Nepal and gave it to Hari as he sat at the reception desk alone.

“So beautiful,” I said and his response was immediate and bitter. “Yes so beautiful, my country—so many trees. Trees, only trees, no jobs.”

But later as I walked through the reception area, his head was bent over the magazine. He didn’t look up as I passed and fleetingly I could feel the trees and rivers of Alaska and Nepal, palpable in a small corner of Kowloon.

Traveling with Ma Thanegi

2010-11-19T02:46:00.000-08:00

Of course it wasn’t Ma Thanegi’s fault that I found myself risking my life trudging beside a busy highway on the outskirts of Penang’s suburbs. Just because I was reading her latest book Defiled on the Ayeyarwaddy when I overshot my bus stop, so immersed in her longing to play the drums at a Kachin festival that I was half-way to the airport before I looked up and realized my error, I have no reason to blame that on her. God knows I’d been eager enough to rush downtown to get her book and bring it home—and it was my greedy curiosity that made me rip the package open before I even left the post office.

Just because I was still thinking about the stones she had found at the beginning of the Ayeyarwaddy River, which she had someone polish into smooth, cool beads and string into necklaces and bracelets, and was feeling blessed that she had given one of each to me, and wondered what they had looked like when Thanegi found them and crammed her pockets full—this was no reason to mentally castigate her while I walked cautiously along a little grassy strip as cars whizzed past me.

I tried hard not to let my mind wander to the prospectors who dredge one of the rivers that becomes part of the Ayeyarwaddy, looking for gold, wondering how similar they were to Alaskan gold panners, and forced myself not to think about the woman with the baby strapped to her back whom Thanegi talked to, the one who dreamed of finding lumps of gold as big as peanuts in the round wooden tray that served as her gold pan.

But as I realized my trek was taking me into the territory of a freeway and retraced my steps to find a less hazardous route, I began to think about the quiet villages and rock-strewn roads and the ice-cold, clear water that began Ma Thanegi’s 1300-mile trip down the Ayeyarwaddy river and felt envious. I roamed past squat, ugly, cement “link houses” with a strong pang of gratitude that I didn’t live in one of them and wondered why some women find themselves wandering in search of a bus stop while others boat-hop their way down one of the world’s great rivers.

When I found a bus that would take me home, I refused to allow myself to go any further with Ma Thanegi until I had entered my apartment. After all, it’s not as though I hadn’t read it before, I scolded myself, I’d edited it, for God’s sake. But even though at one point a year or so ago, I practically knew every page of this book by heart, I couldn’t wait to plop down on my couch and keep reading.

A whole day shot to hell, I thought happily as I sank back into Thanegi’s verbal company. Drat the woman, I echoed her long-suffering pal, Ko Sunny, here we go again…

Ma Thanegi is my friend; I am her editor at ThingsAsian Press. I can’t review this book. But I can lose myself in it, I can get lost while reading it, and I can tell everyone I know that if they want to meet one of my favorite people in the world, take a trip with her down the Ayeyarwaddy. Just don’t begin your journey while you’re still on a bus.

A Little Night Music

2010-11-16T03:44:00.000-08:00

A week ago I went to a fancy little expat café to have a pre-birthday lunch. I ordered a glass of Merlot and spent the next thirty minutes holding the bowl of the glass in my palms trying to warm the wine to a drinkable temperature. It hadn’t been chilled; it had been iced. But it eventually released a little bit of aroma and flavor—I can live with that.

Since I arrived, I’ve tried desperately to find the sort of cute, cheap shoes and handbags that are on every Bangkok street corner. No luck— but Thailand is right over the border—I can live with that.

There was something very dubious in my fried rice today. As long as I can convince myself that it was only the size and shape of a rodent turd and not the thing itself, it’s okay. There are other places to eat—I can live with that.

Somebody above me seems to be fond of chopping vegetables on the floor for an hour or two in the early morning but it’s not every day—I can live with that.

I’ve lived here for almost six weeks now and except for the week of Deepavali, every night at 8 pm, pop singers who will never be at the top of anyone’s charts—least of all mine—sing and whoop and make little speeches until midnight, over sound systems that wouldn’t disgrace the biggest clubs in Vegas, on outdoor stages. For four hours almost every night, I’ve heard music that makes me yearn to be stone deaf.

Penang has a regulation that says noise must stop at midnight—and it does. But because it is regulated, it seems to be the god-given right that anyone with an amplifier can turn it up full-blast every night they choose and keep the noise going until midnight. And we are talking noise that comes blaring into my apartment even when I have all the windows closed and earplugs crammed in my ears. By the time it ends, my delicate little nerves are so jangled that I’m usually awake until after 2 a.m. Bad music does that to me; I can fall sleep listening to Chinese opera but not to this bilge.

“Penang is famous for this,” a woman told me in the elevator the other night—and it’s absolutely true that I live in a complex called Symphony Park with Harmony View right next door. But I didn’t think that would mean that I would end up in Cacophony Acres—and you know? I’m not at all sure I can live with that.

Tonight I saw that the stage across the road from me had been taken down but before I could feel exultant, I saw a sign for another ‘concert” right beside my building. It’s going to happen next week on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. If I had the money, I’d leave town—as it is, I have absolutely no idea of how I’m going to live with that.

…Crazy for Crying and Crazy for Loving You—

2010-11-14T05:12:00.000-08:00

My new life is filled with colors and trees and old architecture and water. It is, I’ve been told, against the law to cut down any of the trees that shade generous portions of the Penang streets and road ways; even in my somewhat lackluster neighborhood, small green groves punctuate the rooftops below my balcony and leafy plumes lend grace to the ugly thoroughfares.

Only a few miles from where I live, in the hills that range at the edge of the suburban sprawl, is jungle and terraced hillsides where crops are being grown and gigantic, mysterious boulders that are the size of small houses. Small clear streams make audible sounds—it is that quiet—and the air smells moist and cool. An unpaved road holds a handmade sign at its beginning—“the art of living” it says and an arrow points invitingly down the lane. Someday soon I’ll go back there just to see where that art can be found.

The street where Sun Yatsen lived for a while still looks as it might have when he walked along it one hundred years ago, if you ignore the little Euro cafes and galleries and boutiques that fill the buildings that were probably much more utilitarian when Dr. Sun plotted revolution in their midst. A Western woman passed by me as I gaped my way along Armenia Street; she held the leash of a large German Shepherd and together they entered one of the old, refurbished houses. I longed for her life, her house, her dog—but only for a moment.

I moved to Penang because I needed time to step away from Bangkok’s jangling turmoil. Seduced by color and greenery and the promise of natural beauty, I signed away a year of my life to live here, in a small city that isn’t prey to the cognitive dissonance that characterizes Bangkok for me.

In Bangkok, I was whisked from downtown to my neighborhood in minutes on a glacially cold subway—and then climbed into the back of a pickup truck and sat until the driver decided he had enough passengers to make it worthwhile to start his vehicle and drive us all home. For the first six months of my return back to my Thai neighborhood, I thought this was charming and then I began to feel homicidal, especially when the humidity was around 110% and it was raining so the driver had put up his Visqueen walls to keep his passengers dry.

There are no pickup truck transport options in Penang, and no motorcycle taxis. Once you leave the downtown area of Georgetown with its taxis and trishaws, you take a bus. It’s clean and airconditioned and just a tiny bit boring. But on the other hand, I don’t conclude a foray into the larger world with thoughts of murdering a fellow-human—or by racing down a highway sitting side-saddle behind a man whom I pray hasn’t had one too many Red Bulls. Oh wait—that was the good part of living in Bangkok, and I realize now I didn’t do it often enough.

In my new home, I get on a bus and I go to the one place I’ve found that has really good coffee beans and I go to another place where I’ve found I can buy the International Herald Tribune and sometimes I go to the spot near the seawall where I can sit at a plastic table and watch the water as I eat something that is very good indeed. I come home to a place that is bright and pleasant and triple the space of any apartment I’ve had in Bangkok for what I would pay for a studio in Thailand’s capital. There are no mosquitoes and no cockroaches and no rooftops to block out the setting sun or the SE Asian l’heure bleu that I love so much.

And there are no bookstores to tempt me into spending my last cent, and no wonderful eccentric opinionated writers and booksellers for me to drink too much beer with as we chat for hours and hours, and there are no riverboats to call me away from my work. And damn it, when I think about it, I’m a lucky old broad. So why am I crying? Beats the hell out of me…

The sky outside my balcony is golden and pink and dark grey with flashes of heat lightning. A curtain of rain rolls toward me and I remember a student years ago in Bangkok asking me “Can you see the shadow of the rain?” Those kinds of memories have informed my life in Thailand and gave it depth. I look down at the houses below me now in Penang and know I will never have the glimmer of understanding about them that I was lucky to have been given in Thailand—and oh god, at this moment how much I miss all that I was so eager to leave behind,

An Illusion of Borders

2010-11-03T22:09:00.000-07:00

Acres of chicklit and the male equivalent, shrines to James Patterson and Jody Picoult, books I might read but only if there were no cereal boxes lying around to keep me company—this is what I found in Penang’s presiding bookstores. I came away with nothing I yearned for—a map, a book on Bahasa Malay, the conclusion of Anchee Min’s life of the Empress Tsu-zi.

Kinokuniya in Bangkok had kept me alive as a reader, along with Orchid Books’ history selection and the wonderful grab-bag of perpetual surprises of well-chosen used books at Dasa Book Café. What in the merry hell was I going to do for books in Georgetown, I wondered gloomily. A used bookstore yielded a volume of Agnes Smedley’s wartime years in China and I read it slowly, trying to make it last.

And then I rode past yet another mall, which is where bookstores live in this part of the world, and a sign emblazoned on it announced that it held a branch of Borders Books and Music. As someone who resolutely avoided Borders and Barnes & Noble in the States, I didn’t get off my bus, but the damage was done.

A day later I set off to investigate what a Malaysian version of a big-box category-killer might have to offer. I walked into a gigantic brightly lit room with a Starbucks off to one side; I almost walked out but there were display tables…

And on them were multiple copies of Dan Brown’s latest and good old James and Jody and many, many vampire novels. Nothing leaped out at me in the fiction section as I wandered past its shelves and I kept on going. There was a separate space for music, half of the room I was in held really ugly children’s books and stationary supplies with the rest of it a confused jumble of haphazardly placed books in the usual sections. But not all the usual bookstore sections were visible, to me at least.

I roamed around and finally gave up. At the information desk was an earnest-looking boy who responded, “We don’t have a biography section.”

I tried to keep my voice level as I repeated his statement. I tried to smile but I knew it was a grimace as he explained that if I wanted a biography of a writer, I should look on the fiction shelves.

I did. I also looked for the short stories of Somerset Maugham and any of Joseph Conrad’s Asia-based novels and finally just one book that I might want to read. I came away with a thirty-year old novel by Alison Lurie and the knowledge that I would never, ever return to this hellish parody of places that have nourished me and brought me great joy.

But the truly terrible part of my abortive shopping expedition is that if this place had the vaguest idea of how to be a bookstore, I would have returned. And somewhere in my most hidden portion of my heart, I wish it had been well-stocked and well-run and you know what? If you were here, you would wish the very same thing…every last one of you bibliophiles and independent booksellers, because like me, you are an addict and will take what you need wherever you can get it. Be grateful you aren’t in my position and be sure to support what you are lucky to have, junkies.

Writing without Thought

2010-11-01T22:31:00.000-07:00

My postcard post was written with the same degree of carelessness that I use to scrawl a message on an actual postcard. I think that's fair for a blog entry but it isn't a true representation of my deepest thoughts and feelings about Bangkok.

Certainly, like any spot in the world, it has flaws. It also has been extraordinarily generous to me, and many people whom I love I would never know if Bangkok hadn't presented them to me.

When I returned two years ago and rented an apartment at RTS Condotel, I had no idea I would meet a family there who have become my friends. Mrs. Nupa, Mr. Prateep and their two sons have brightened my Bangkok life with their intelligence and warmth and radiant kindness. I'm lucky that we are still in touch on facebook, I hope they will come to visit me here in the year to come, and I desperately miss the conversations that I would often pop in to have with them and hope to continue to have throughout our lives.

My friend Usa and I have struck a sort of generation gap that had never come between us before. She is a vibrant, beautiful woman in her 30s and I am a 60-year-old who has slowed down a lot. But I love her dearly and know that in another few years, that energy gap will narrow and once again we'll spend hours chatting and eating and having a good time, whether it's here, there or someplace in the middle. And if we're lucky, her evil brother Eddy will be with us.

A friend of more recent vintage is the irrepressible Jessica C--I met her in person in Bangkok soon after she returned from a long meditative stay in Chiang Mai so I was ready to bask in her spiritual wisdom. "Let's go somewhere where we can have a bottle of wine with dinner," she suggested--which was a challenge for me because it was a Buddhist holiday and alcohol was off the menu in most restaurants. We ended up eating terrific food and drinking a very nice merlot in a hotel restaurant near Patpong--an evening that cemented our friendship, for me at least.

As for my relationship with Bangkok? I'm examining it from a distance in a trial separation--not for the first time since I first fell in love with it fifteen years ago. It's the place where I found my voice, where I learned to live in a way that made sense to me, it might be the place where I grew up. I love it still, always and forever.

Postcard from Penang

2010-10-31T23:25:00.000-07:00

The hills behind my building are where the storms roll in and as clouds begin to crawl down their slopes, I begin to think of hillstations and Somerset Maugham and gin on the veranda and malaria. They are green-covered; they look uninhabited and very, very nearby, so today I went off to see how close I could get to what appeared to be a place that could harbor tigers and the bones of Jim Thompson.

What I found was mint-chocolate ice cream that pretended to be gelato and suburbia that wouldn’t disgrace any residential community of Dade County. One-story cement houses with low-pitched roofs behind hurricane fences with paved yards had me ready to cut my throat within five minutes. They boded ill for what would be found on the hillsides, and I remembered the slopes of slightly grander suburban domiciles that I was shown when searching for a home in my first week. As I turned back and trudged down the empty sidewalk toward my home in Symphony Park, I realized how grateful I would have been in Bangkok for that amenity and tried not to wish for the community that would have clogged it solid on Chokchai Ruammit.

In my neighborhood on the edge of Georgetown, there is very little garbage. The food vendors probably thrive on gossip but they are discreet in their observations. They share a public dignity that isn’t unfriendly but is definitely unobtrusive. Thailand’s slapdash entrepreneurship seems a universe away.

And I do not miss it, but I miss people—the coffee guy with his baby, Nim and her Burmese assistant, the songtao driver who looks like Carabao, Victor, Don, and Jerry Hopkins, wonderful Nana, Khun Anusorn at the Villa Bookazine—and of course the damned cat.

Kinokuniya and grilled chicken I would import in a heartbeat given the chance. And the riverboats. Definitely motorcycle taxis. Cute shoes and handbags, but I can bring those back here, given the chance.

I don’t miss the selfish, greedy, cruel politicians who are ruining the country, or songtaos. Or the pervasive grey of dirty concrete, or the condos that are taking over the neighborhood in my corner of that city.

I will make a life here in Georgetown, at least for a year. But at the moment, I do not think I will find a home.

I know if I went out right now and got on a bus and went to the Indian section, I would immediately feel happy. But I don’t want to use that panacea up too fast because I need it to buoy me for eleven more months in this place.

And then? Beijing? Mukdahan? Who knows? Three months ago I had never been to Penang and now it’s my address—a long way from Anchor Point, Alaska.

Sympathy for Pandora

2010-10-29T00:29:00.000-07:00

I am addicted to natural light. I chalk this up to my years in Fairbanks, Alaska, which is 100 miles from the Arctic Circle and is pitch-black by mid-afternoon in winter, with the sun rising at around ten the next day. Put me in a dark room and after a week, I will tell you everything, including any lies you may want to hear, so I can feel light on my skin once more.

When I looked on the internet for a room in Penang that I could call home while I searched for a more lasting one, a window was my biggest requisite, followed closely by an en suite bathroom. My friend Judy had found both at a place called the Broadway Budget Hotel, in the Indian section of the city, and since that was an area that I loved, I booked a room there for a week.

My third-floor room turned out to be clean and had a huge bank of windows overlooking the street. During my first hours in it, I had a stunning view of a Hindu funeral procession and at twilight I watched the minaret of one of Georgetown’s largest mosques change from a stabbing white to a a pearlescent softness, washed in the pale blues and pinks and yellows of sunset.

The hotel is on the street that is the division between the Chinese and Indian parts of the city. Strings of green lights were being festooned from one side to the other for Deepavali and every evening a new strand of green illuminated the darkness. Chinese storefront cafes faced Indian tea stalls across the way and a woman at the Jolly Café introduced me to the restorative bite of nutmeg juice, showing me the fruit that it is made from. After years of loving the smell and taste of nutmeg, I had to come to a Chinese café after I turned 60 to learn that the spice comes from a small, golden orb that resembles an apricot and I became even more besotted with Penang.

One night I had trouble falling asleep, feeling as though little whispers of touch were roaming over my body. Using my mobile phone as a flashlight, I focused its dim beam on my arm—something on it was moving. I turned on the light and not only was there a flourishing colony of bugs on the bed with me, there was clear evidence under the fitted sheet and below my pillow that my restless turning during the past hour had killed many others of their tribe. Small brown spots dotted the cotton bedding I’d brought with me and had used to replace the hotel’s polyester sheet and pillowcases and scratchy terrycloth blanket.

The living insects retreated when the bedroom light was on and I switched on both the fan and air conditioner, hoping they would dislike the chilled rush of air. Unfortunately they seemed not to care. Soon there were even more of them, all different sizes, some of them reddish-brown and swollen with blood which I knew couldn’t be mine, because there were no bites anywhere on my body.

There were too many to kill, although I tried. I flushed some down the toilet and trapped a few under a glass turned upside down in an ashtray. I went downstairs to the reception desk, hoping that I could change rooms but there was nobody there. The office was dark and an open doorway allowed anyone who wanted shelter to come up the staircase and into the “secure” hotel. I went back to my room and locked my door. I put on street clothes and lay on top of the king-size sheet I used as a blanket. I zipped my open bags shut and prayed the bugs hadn’t found refuge within them yet. I tried to sleep with the light on and the air conditioner at full-blast. Shortly after the first call to prayer floated from the mosques and the night faded into grey, the bugs retreated and I dozed for a couple of hours, jerking awake at intervals to be sure I was alone.

I gave the maid my bedding and every scrap of clothing that had been lying around the room to wash and iron and the management put me on another floor that they swore was free of vermin. I checked the mattress for little dots of blood, found none, and tried to relax. That night something bit me and my arms and legs were soon covered with tidy lines of swollen skin that itched unmercifully. I turned on the light, saw nothing, and was sure it was some form of gnat. I put on a long-sleeved shirt, a pair of slacks and slathered every exposed skin cell with lavender oil, but still new portions of my body continued to flare into wild itching and new welts appeared under my clothes.

The next day I googled bed bugs.

As I already knew, those were the insects in my former room and photos on the internet confirmed that. What was even more horrible was that my body was covered with their bites, which are retroactive. There are people who have no reaction to bed bug bites and there are those who react strongly to them. With 93 bites that I could see and more under my shoulder blades and on my buttocks, I quite obviously fell in the camp of strong reactors. The bites, I learned, could linger as long as a week, as did the power of the itch, which could, Google told me, be eased by antihistamines.

At this point I was honestly terrified. I had found an apartment and the thought of carrying bed bugs into it made me want to vomit. I inspected everything I owned and found no trace of insects. After the first night when my bites erupted, no new ones came to join them and there was no trace of bugs at night. Once again, I tried not to feel crazed.

When I left the hotel to move to my apartment, I handed my suitcases to a taxi driver and glanced down as he took them. There, moving across the smaller bag, was a bed bug. I reached out instinctively and crushed it with my thumbnail. The driver put the bags in the trunk of his taxi and I sat in sheer misery as we drove to my new home.

My suitcases never left the hallway of my building. I put everything within them in the small entryway before I unlocked the door to my apartment. Everything that could be laundered I put in a drawstring bag and tied it tightly. All of my other possessions went into a bathroom where the white tile would clearly reveal any bugs that might crawl over it. I closed the door, took my clothing to a laundry right outside the apartment building that had a dryer big enough for me to sleep in. Then I threw away every bag I owned, including the ones that had held my netbook and camera—and my wonderful green handbag that I had bought in Bangkok and loved.

There are wooden dining chairs in my apartment and metal ones on the balcony. This is where I sat for the first week of my occupancy. The two cushy leather sofas were off limits to me; I inspected them every evening, praying that the night I met my landlord and sat on one of them hadn’t led to an infestation. I peered at the tiles of my bathroom religiously and have never in my life before been quite so happy to see little red ants. I leaped upon every little speck of dirt and moving particle of lint in all six rooms of my apartment—in fact I still do—and it was a week before I slept on one of the beds.

Everything that I painfully carried in heavy suitcases on the train to Penang is still imprisoned in clear, snap-topped, plastic boxes. I have opened one of them once, a week ago, out on the balcony with the sliding door firmly shut. I removed camera cords, looked them over with the piercing gaze of an electronic microscope, used them, and then snapped them back into smaller plastic containers.

I’ve been in my new home for three weeks with no appearance of bed bugs. At night I can be awakened by the ceiling fan in my bedroom when it blows a thread from the comforter against my skin or when a hair falls from my head onto my neck. As I write this, my skin literally crawls and I check for small moving objects.

Every day I yearn for my dictionary and the wonderful guide to Penang’s architecture and the Teach Yourself Malay study guide I bought soon after my arrival at the Broadway Budget Bedbug Bonanza. The things I carried from Bangkok are without any value and are all treasures—a small carved box my children gave me for Mother’s Day a lifetime ago, a chess set from my youngest son, a small wooden figure from Africa that my oldest son bought when he worked at Pier One, photographs…all snapped away in quarantine.

For almost a month I’ve stared, with a mixture of longing and dread, at boxes that hold traces of a history that I cherish. The myth of Pandora is the only thing that keeps me from opening them, along with the memory of things crawling through the darkness, feasting on my skin.

Where Air Means Water

2010-10-28T00:07:00.000-07:00

“Every few months there will be a water bill,” my landlord explained. “and if it isn’t paid, they will shut off the water to the apartment.”

I had been in my lovely new apartment for a week when a clump of mail came addressed to my landlord. One of the missives was a postcard with red letters, obviously a bill, but for a trifling amount of what amounted to six US dollars. The postcard was in Bahasa Malaysian and was from some company that obviously dealt in air conditioners, since Air was a prominent part of their name. I put the mail in a safe place and got ready for my first house guest.

The day before my friend Lee arrived, a notice went up that on the first day of his visit, water service to my floor would be suspended while repairs were done. Being an Alaskan homesteader by upbringing, I filled two large buckets with water for hygienic purposes, bought a gallon of drinking water, and Lee and I both made sure to get up early for showers on the morning of the appointed day.

As far as we could tell, there was no interruption in our supply and the next morning I foolishly dumped one bucket of my improvised reservoir. Soon after I did this, I had no running water in my apartment.

When it was still in abeyance the next day, I began to feel vexed. Lee had wisely departed by that time and I used the last of my reserved water for a very unsatisfying shower. With a sink full of dirty coffee cups, I went down to see when the building would restore my water.

It wasn’t my building—it was the red postcard saying that if the bill weren’t paid, I would lose all rights to cleanliness. Air in Bahasa means water, and if I live to be 110, I will still have that piece of linguistic competence implanted firmly in my memory.

After I had traveled downtown to pay the bill, made many, many phone calls, and hurled myself upon the kindness of the building management staff, this morning a man wearing an official water department vest appeared at my door to remove the clamp on my water meter. “Do you have a pipe wrench?” he asked with a very sweet smile, and finding that I didn’t, began what sounded like an impotent round of tapping on the restraining apparatus that deprived me of water.

“Turn on your tap and see what happens,” he told me, and I became grateful I didn’t have a pipe wrench because I just might have used it to hit him. But in seconds he became world peace, a cure for cancer, and Santa Claus all rolled into one body, as water gushed from my bathroom sink and for the first time in almost 48 hours, I could flush my toilet.

Air=water, cleanliness=sanity, and the Penang Water Department=I have no words. All I know is for a matter of six dollars aided by my linguistic idiocy, they quite efficiently showed me what life would be like without a functioning water supply, and believe me, it isn’t pretty. I've always had an affinity for water, but now I worship it.

Thank Heaven You're Not French, Ethel--Have Another Bag of Them Freedom Fries

2010-10-18T21:38:00.000-07:00

If a male journalist led off a feature article explaining the news that as part of their post-natal care, French women are offered “a state-paid extended course of vaginal gymnastics, complete with personal trainer,” readers might assume a certain degree of prurient interest on his part. When a woman begins a front-page International Herald Tribune article with this fact, and then follows it up with “French women seem to have it all: multiple children, a job, and often, a figure to die for,” it’s forgivable to think there’s a tiny bit of guillotine-sharpening going on.

“What they do not have is equality,” the article trumpets, pointing out that in a recent gender equality report, France lags behind the U.S., Japan, Jamaica, and Kazakhstan. French men occupy 82% of their country’s parliamentary seats and earn 26% more than their female counterparts. French women spend twice as much time on domestic duties than men do, while popping out more babies and popping in more antidepressants than women in any other European country. (“More babies,” as the article admits later, means an average of 2 children, rather than the 1.5 in the rest of the EU—which erases the brood mare image that the reporter offers in her opening paragraphs.) “They worry about being feminine, not feminist, and men often display a form of gallantry predating the 1789 revolution.”

The editor in chief of Elle complains “We have the right to do anything as long as we also take care of the children, cook a delicious dinner, and look immaculate. We have to be superwomen.”

Let’s stop and sob for our poor oppressed French sisters—women whose government guarantees four months of paid maternity leave, the right to take time off or reduce hours at work until the baby turns three—and don’t forget those bouts of “perineal therapy.” French families receive “a generous family allowance” that kicks in after the second child, plus tax deductions—and France provides free all-day nursery school with childcare from 8:30 am until 6:30 at night for “toddlers as young as 2.” Oh the horror, the horror. To top off this grisly picture, every day “French women spend on average 5 hours and 1 minute on child care and domestic tasks, while men spend 2 hours and 7 minutes.” And in France there is a Baccarat crystal ceiling, or as one Frenchwoman puts it, “a patriarchal corporate culture.”

I come from a country that has yet to pass a constitutional amendment that would guarantee American women equal rights, and where the Roe versus Wade decision teeters on the brink of extinction with every Supreme Court justice chosen by a Republican president. I never totaled up the amount of time I spent after work on “childcare and domestic tasks,” but I’m quite sure it was hovering around that average of 5 hours and 1 minute, and equality of pay in my workplace fell under the category of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” At that time of my life, I remembered reading long ago about the oppressed women in Communist Russia who worked all day and then went home and worked some more. As a small girl in the 50s, I thought that was horrible. As a wife and mother in the 80s, I found that was my life.

American women continue what seems to be a losing battle for subsidized—if not free—childcare, for paid maternity leave, for pediatric health care that won’t beggar their bank accounts. The last time I checked, the House and Senate were male-dominated and corporations headed by women were still a back-patting anomaly. Many American women have figures that are potentially deadly, rather than “to die for,” because the food they can afford to put on their tables is highly processed, flavorless, and fattening. Macaroni and cheese, anyone? Or how about a nice tuna casserole for that “delicious dinner…”

We Americans might outrank French women in equality to men, but they have advantages we can only dream of. Healthy vaginal muscles may be one benefit of being French and female, but that is far outweighed by—oh free childcare, perhaps. It would be interesting to see a similar profile of American working mothers in the IHT. One thing is certain, if such a story were published, it wouldn’t lead off with the state of our vaginas. Because we have superior gender equality, n’est-ce pas?

Settling In

2010-10-14T20:42:00.000-07:00

I came to Penang with the romantic idea of living in one of its candy-colored buildings at the edges of Georgetown’s historic area. I had been sure I wanted to make my home in the upper reaches of a shophouse there until I visited one that my friend Elizabeth had rented in Thonburi. Except for on the front of the building, the house had no windows. It was sandwiched tightly between two similar residences and it felt dark and stuffy. As I watched her wrestle with the gate that secured the place, I knew I was made of far weaker stuff than she. I need light and air or I shrivel up into a torpid lump of depression.

In Bangkok, renting an apartment is as easy as getting a room in a hotel. In Penang I would probably still be homeless if not for my pal Victor, who introduced me to a friend of his who grew up in this city. He gave me the name of a friend who is a Penang resident, born and bred, and that is the only reason I have a place to live today.

It didn’t surprise me that there were no rental listings in the daily paper, since the internet has killed that form of advertising all over the world. What did surprise me was the lack of apartment listings online for the area that I wanted, and the neighborhoods that did have vacancies could have been on the dark side of the moon for all I knew. Photographs yielded images of gargantuan apartment blocks and my optimism wavered. “I’ll give it a week,” I told myself, but the property agent I contacted by email was elusive and the one that I was introduced to by friendly waiters in an Indian restaurant seemed more eager to take me to dinner than anything else.

But there was Lynn, the friend of a friend. If I didn’t think, mistakenly as it turned out, that she herself was a rental agent, I would never have imposed upon her. By the time I found out that I was wrong, I already knew that she was a someone I liked and wanted as a friend. As was her oldest sister, whom we went to visit and who lived in an apartment that I yearned for.

It was in one of the characterless blocks, about three miles from the historic part of Georgetown, but it was full of light with a view from the balcony and cross-ventilation in addition to large ceiling fans in every room. And it had three bedrooms and two baths and a functioning kitchen—all for the price of a Bangkok studio. The neighborhood was thick with food vendors and when we went out to explore, I found that this area brimmed with the same life I had loved when I first came to Bangkok. There wasn’t a Starbucks or a MacDonald’s in sight, although an Old Town White Coffee, a local chain, had wifi and air-conditioning right across the road.

Lynn’s sister Jessie is the neighborhood’s unofficial goodwill ambassador who knows everyone in the area and she stretched out her antenna to find a place for me in her building. I was in Georgetown for exactly a week before I saw the apartment that is now my home.

It is fully furnished, right down to the towels and flatware, has a washing machine and two large televisions and a view from the 21^st floor. The “characterless” building is clean and friendly and has a covered patio area with free wifi and a pool. Food is only steps away from the entrance and there’s great bus service to downtown. A small variety store sells me garbage bags and dish towels and other necessities—the lady who runs it is quite chatty and she speaks serviceable English.

After making an excursion to the area I had intended to live in, where I had a late lunch at an area of food stalls that adjoined the sea wall, I stopped in at her little shop in search of small glass bowls to use as soap dishes.

“Where did you go today?” she asked me and I immediately translated that to the Thai question “Bpai nai ma?” The world shrunk a tiny bit and my nomadic heart sprouted a tentative but hopeful tendril of a root.

Do You Take Sugar and Margarine in Your Coffee?

2010-10-10T22:06:00.000-07:00

Supermarkets as my friend Katia has already pointed out on her blog, Scribbly Katia at http://katianovetsaintlot.blogspot.com/, are emotional minefields for the unwary expatriate. A friend once suggested that the title of my autobiography could be The Woman Who Cried in Supermarkets, and she had a very good point. When I first moved to Bangkok, the sight of Oreos reminded me of packing lunch boxes for my sons and I would mist over. When I returned to the states, the same thing happened when I saw Thai orchids at a checkout stand. I learned to carry sunglasses along with my shopping lists to hide any surprise attacks of tears.

Yesterday I went to a supermarket near my new neighborhood to find coffee--if not beans that could be ground on the spot (since I have yet to buy my own coffee grinder), at least instant coffee that had no sugar or powdered creamer in the mix and that wasn't made by Nestle. This seemed achievable because I had drunk many cups of what Georgetown calls "local coffee", a powdered coffee that comes black and strong in the cup, with flavor and a real caffeine kick.

No beans, no grinder, but bags upon bags heaped in middle of the aisle displays--finally I found one that said "No sugar." I hurled it into my cart and then felt suspicious for some unknown reason. I looked at the list of ingredients, which were mercifully in English. "Coffee," it announced, "sugar, margarine..." and there was something else that followed but at that point my brain froze. Butter tea I had heard of, and it did indeed make me queasy at the thought, but margarine in my coffee?

I gulped hard. My defenses fell. Suddenly I remembered the coffee bean corners at Tops and Villa supermarkets in Bangkok and I was prey to mist and a weird sort of longing for that particular aspect of the city I couldn't wait to leave.

I carried on. I found the aisle where there was powdered coffee in jars and some of it was coffee unaccompanied by any sweetener or milk impersonator. I chose a jar that said Indochine and prayed hard that it would be drinkable. Then I carefully avoided any aisle that might carry memory, finished my shopping, and faced the challenge of finding my way back to the escalators, always a test in a new shopping mall.

Georgetown is proud of its White Coffee--a mixture like 3-in-1 but more caffeinated. It's a city with coffee stalls and shops on every square inch of space and it is to its credit that Starbucks is only in a few places that cater to the expat community and upscale travelers. Far be it from me to denigrate local specialties but when I go back out today in search of coffee I can drink with pleasure, I hope I can accomplish this without tears.